May 2026 CEO letter
Take Your Crown Out Your Pocket and Rock It
By Chris “Baba C” Chatmon, Founder & CEO, Kingmakers of Oakland
There is a sign on the wall inside KOO Labs Design Center and Production House in West Oakland. It reads: “Take your crown out your pocket and rock it.”
That line came from King Jonathan, age 18, from Oakland. Like so much wisdom that comes from our young people, it is both personal and prophetic. He was speaking to himself. He was speaking to every Black boy and young man still learning how to stand fully in his gifts. And he was speaking to all of us who have been called to build the conditions where our Kings can thrive.
This month, I have been thinking deeply about what it means for our young Kings to take their crowns out of their pockets in the age of artificial intelligence, social media, and rapidly changing technology.
On any given Wednesday afternoon at KOO Labs, you can see the future already being built. A 16-year-old layers a beat on a MIDI controller. Ninth graders pull stills from a short film they shot the week before. A young King sketches a logo in Procreate. Another sits behind a podcast mic interviewing an Oakland elder about what the city used to sound like.
In too many rooms, that same image, Black boys with phones, headphones, and screens, is misread as distraction, danger, or deficit. But at Kingmakers of Oakland, we know better. Our young Kings are not problems to be managed. They are producers. Designers. Thinkers. Researchers. Griots-in-training. They are building futures that our systems have not yet learned how to teach.
That is why our work is not simply about technology access. It is about sovereignty.
We are living in a time when the digital feed has become a curriculum. Every day, our young people are being taught by algorithms what to watch, what to desire, what to fear, and too often, what to believe about themselves. The feed is not neutral. It can learn grief and sell more grief. It can catch a young person watching one fight clip and serve fifty more. It can misread Black skin, criminalize Black expression, and mistake conversations about discrimination for hate speech.
And still, inside that contradiction, there is possibility.
The same platforms that can cause harm can also become studios, stages, classrooms, and archives. The same tools that have been used to surveil and pathologize Black boyhood can be turned, in the hands of our young Kings, toward joy, resistance, wellness, and self-definition.
At KOO, we call this work AI²: Ancestral Intelligence times Artificial Intelligence. That is more than a phrase. It is an operating system.
Ancestral Intelligence reminds us that our people have always had technologies of survival, memory, healing, design, and liberation. Artificial Intelligence is one of the defining tools of this era. Our responsibility is not to run from it, nor to adopt it blindly. Our responsibility is to center humanity, culture, identity, and justice as our young people learn to interrogate, build, and lead with these tools.
Over the past year, Kingmakers of Oakland has directly served more than 1,000 Black male students, our Kings, across 20+ school sites nationally through our Manhood Development Program. In our most recent survey, 87 percent of Kings reported feeling more confident in school and more connected to their identity and community. That is what happens when culture is not decoration. The Cure is in our Culture, which is the foundation.
Now we are building from that foundation into the next chapter.
In 2026, we are launching the Sankofa Kings Fellowship, a yearlong experience for Kings ages 12 to 25. The Fellowship brings together three powerful strands: our Crowns Curriculum, rooted in Ma’at, Maafa, Sankofa, and Afrofuturism; Youth Participatory Action Research, where our Kings become researchers of their own communities; and AI technical training, including prompt engineering, generative tools, spatial AI, and emerging technologies.
Our Fellows will not simply use AI. They will question it. They will test it for bias. They will build with it. They will own their intellectual property. And they will carry what they learn back into schools and communities as peer educators.
This is what it looks like to move our young people from consumers to social architects.
We also know we cannot do this work alone. This season has reminded us that the future of education, technology, wellness, and public policy must be built through real partnership. Not charity. Partnership. That means shared budgets, standing seats at planning tables, long-term commitments, and community-based infrastructure that outlives any one grant cycle, principal, superintendent, or political moment.
The policy question before us is not whether Black boys will engage technology. They already are. The question is whether we will apprentice them or surveil them. Whether we will fund their imagination or police their curiosity. Whether we will see them as risks to be contained or as authors of the systems that will shape the future.
At Kingmakers of Oakland, we choose authorship.
We choose to build spaces where our Kings can make beats, films, podcasts, poems, research, businesses, and movements. We choose to build with partners who understand that access and protection are necessary, but not sufficient. Our young Kings need access. They need safety. They also need power, ownership, mentorship, cultural grounding, and room to create.
I want to close with one of our young Kings, Amir Robinson. Amir once told me he wanted to teach poetry. He said he wanted people to know that “you can express the way you feel by writing down words, and that you don’t have to yell or cuss or fight all the time.”
Then he shared a poem. One of the closing lines asked: “Do wishes still come true if you wish on a satellite?”
That question has stayed with me.
A young Black man, holding both poetry and technology in the same breath, was asking us what kind of future is still possible. He was reminding us that our young people are not waiting for us to imagine their futures. They are already imagining.
The work before us is to be worthy of what they see.
So this June, as we continue building KOO Labs, preparing the Sankofa Kings Fellowship, deepening our partnerships, and carrying this movement forward nationally, I return to King Jonathan’s charge:
Take your crown out your pocket and rock it.
To our Kings: we see you.To our families: we honor you.To our educators, partners, funders, and community: we need you.And to everyone who believes Black boys and young men deserve to be loved, protected, challenged, and equipped to lead, let’s keep building.
No half stepping cuz it will get you half way.
We know that what you put in, is what you get in return and if you seek it all you will find it.