"Rap or go to the league"
Meet Alabamian poet, professor, playwright, activist and human Jahman Hill.
In July I had 24 hours in Washington, D.C., one of my favorite places, partially because I lived there briefly, between 2009-2010. An important moment from those formative years was discovering Busboys and Poets and their open mic poetry nights. I loved hearing people perform and that I too could get up and say words to a crowd when I felt brave enough.
It was a humid Tuesday evening when I popped in for another quick poetry sesh at the 14th & V Street location. I was intrigued to go as I had read about a featured guest poet from Alabama named Jahman Hill. I liked his performances and while I didn’t get to meet him on the night, I reached out to him later and asked for an interview. We talked for nearly an hour via Instagram video chat, and he did not hold back. The 30-year-old teacher/writer/playwright is also a nonprofit founder, an activist and a kind person who took some time to speak with me.
Part of the reason I wanted to interview Jahman was because he writes poems about Alabama, but he was actually born in Rochester, New York. He is one of 12 kids; his father was a preacher and his mother, a nurse. Seeing them dedicate their lives to service inspired him do the same.
”I was raised in two different places in Kansas, Fort Leavenworth; I was there till fifth grade, and then when we got to sixth grade, we moved to this tiny, tiny town called Larned, Kansas. And that town has population, 3,500 people. (Kansas is) definitely the Midwest. Is countryier than a mug,” he says.
He came to Alabama his junior year of college; he went to a community college first. Jahman’s journey into the arts started with a disappointment in his own growth, literally.
”So I was at a community college because when I was in high school, I just knew I was going to be 6’2 or 6’3, like my Dad, and I was going to become a pro basketball player and go to Syracuse University, back in New York, and then go to the NBA. But when I graduated high school, I was still 5’10, and I said, ‘Okay, I'm gonna have to figure something else out. Let's see what what scholarships are popping?’” he says.
He got a scholarship to do Speech and Debate in Hutchinson, Kansas.
”I didn't really know what Speech and Debate was, but I was like, ‘cool, I'll do this thing and maybe get on the basketball team, and then I'll become 6’3.’ And after my first year, I was kind of like, ‘I don't think I'm gonna be 6‘3. I'm still 5’10 and turned that into a scholarship to the University of Alabama to do Speech and Debate,’ which is how I got to the South,” he says.
Despite his longstanding desire to be a professional basketball player, arriving in Alabama gave him new things to think about. It was in his junior year of college he wrote his first poem. Before then he felt his future was one of two options, “rap or go to the league.” These are often the only two options African Americans feel they have, he told me.
”I had a very limited view of Blackness growing up, and part of that was because once I moved into these majority white spaces, like outside of my family, what I saw for Blackness was filtered through a white lens. So, when I listened to the radio, the only Black voices I heard were doing hip hop or a certain kind of pop that white people liked or that they deemed appropriate,” he says. “I gained a deeper understanding of Black folks once I was able to enter majority Black spaces. And I was like, ‘wow, it's amazing to think that there's such a wide variety of Black people who have all sorts of different thoughts, ideas and opinions, and to think that at a certain time, I only saw a limited view of that is wild.”
In 2014 he was at Tuscaloosa freestyling with his best friend who suggested he should write poems. Jahman still performs the earliest poem he remembers writing. It’s called “Platonic, an instruction manual to escape the friendzone.” He doesn’t write many love poems anymore as they were very angsty “hotep poems.”
”Hotep refers to a specific facet of the African American community that would be exemplified by Dr Umar Johnson of today. It's this specific, typically patriarchal view of African Americans, where you're saying ‘grand rising queen’ and ‘my king, my king.’ Politically, I've matured since then. But at that time, we were all kings and queens. It’s an attempt to regain power within the Black community, an entire sub subculture within African American community,” he says of hotep.
His poetry quickly evolved. He began exploring activism through spoken word. He wanted to go after justice, for poetry to serve as a catalyst.
”If it wasn't me crushing on this girl that I was afraid to talk to, saying whatever cheesy, corny stuff I was saying, it was okay, ‘how do I channel the voice of a Nat Turner? Or a Angela Davis or Assata Shakur or Amiri Baraka? How do I create poetry that is able to challenge systems? Gil Scott Heron, these were the poets that I see now,” he says.
He began using poetry as a tool for social change.
He worked with an organization on campus called We Are Done and met every Tuesday morning with the Vice President of Student Affairs to talk about demands and visions for the future. He created the Alabama Student Association For Poetry and every February during Black History Month they held “The Blackout.”
”I was like, how can I pay all my Black folk poet friends that I've met from all over the country? How can I put money in their pockets to come to the University of Alabama and perform the Blackest fucking poems that they have?” he says.
The University paid for everything, and people of every skin color came out to see the show. The first event was in 2017 at the same time when the movie Black Panther came out.
“We actually saw the premiere of Black Panther the night of The Blackout. We rented out theaters in Birmingham. We gave away all the tickets to the students and the poets, and everybody did their poems, Black Black Black! Then we went and watched Black Panther. Everybody had their gear on. And it was an amazing; it was really one of the coolest things that I've ever been able to be a part of and have a hand in creating,” he says.
It was a similar theme that actually started Jahman’s interest in social justice issues as a young child.
”In 1995 there was this movie called Panther. It was about the Black Panther Party. And as a kid, I saw Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale take on the fascist pigs that were the police. And I remember seeing that movie. We had the video cassette. I really liked that movie. I was like, ‘alright, cool.’ Didn't know at the time I was being radicalized. I grew up with that, but also being in a majority white space, my parents were also very adamant about us learning about our history and knowing that we were Black,” he says. “When we moved to Larned, my mom was not happy about it. She was like, ‘this place is racist.’ I didn't really have the words or understanding of it at the time, but I knew that my mom did not like the place for that reason.”
I was interested to see how he found the South in comparison to Kansas, although I already knew some observations from a poem he did on the night about the Montgomery Brawl.
He had stories for me. College wasn’t quite what he expected.
”When I got to campus, I was thoroughly disappointed when I saw more white people than I had seen people in my in my life, you know, spending most of my conscious teen hood in Larned, Kansas, population, 3,600 to be at a school of 36,000, it was what we call Rush Week. So my very first day of class, I saw probably over 10,000 white women. I was very confused. This monolithic sea of white girls and big T shirts all through Sorority Row. I was like, this is not what I signed up for,” he jokes.
Jahman now lives and works in Birmingham. He said it’s is a slow moving city, but he’s an adaptable person; in many ways it doesn’t seem that different from other places he’s lived.
”The one thing that's decidedly different is, living in Birmingham now, the vast majority of people in leadership are Black. Like, my mayor's Black. The City Council is Black. The teachers are Black, the principals are Black, and I never experienced that growing up. But what I realized is while it may look like that in this classroom, we are still in America, and the issues of racism permeate our city, permeate ways of thinking. There's a Black conservatism that exists here and in America. America is conservative. Our Democrats are conservative; it's a very conservative space. I think people who haven't really lived outside of America think that liberals are left. Liberals are not leftist at all. They're super conservative. So, our Black liberal spaces are, especially in the South, actually very conservative,” he says.
He notes that religion plays a huge role and there's a church around every corner.
“Being here, I realized that even though I'm in this majority Black space the same issues exist. We're still trying to fight poverty. We're still trying to fight school-to-prison pipeline. We're still trying to battle narratives of our Black youth. We're still trying to convince people that Black folks aren't violent. We're still trying to get Black folks to trust in Black folks and recognize, because there's so much harm that’s been done to the entire race of people. Trying to undo all that harm is a very slow process,” he says.
Jahman still plays basketball all the time, by the way. Along with writing and performing, he teaches African American studies and runs a nonprofit that he and his best friend founded, The Flourish Alabama. He’s put a lot of work into this.
”We do arts education, we build events and build out the creative artist economy, and we're building a Black arts district here in Birmingham. And the whole idea is we believe Black people are infinitely possible beings, so we do all this work. Trying to uplift and challenge systems of oppression, utilizing the arts. So there are so many different ways we try to do that every day,” he says.
Thanks so much to Jahman for taking a big chunk of your Friday night to talk to me. I learned a lot and had fun doing it, a sign of a good teacher.
Here’s a little snippet of a poem I got from him on the night. Look him up and follow him on Instagram to see more.