Jahmir Brown is a skateboarder born & raised in Philadelphia who rides for Palace Skateboards. Being one of the last of a generation to have came up at Love Park, Jahmir continues the world famous Philadelphia heritage of plaza skating even after spots like Muni have been shut down.

Having been raised in Southwest Philly where skate-industry shots were far & few, Jahmir picked up skating at 5 years old and through years of spending time at his local spots in Philly, he organically found himself riding for Palace through friendships with Jahmal Smith, Chewy Cannon and Brooks. His skating has gained worldwide recognition through his video parts on Thrasher, as well as footage in the Palace videos. Alongside skating, Jahmir spends time DJing, as well as doing creative design and direction for brands.

IGOR — Can you speak about your first time seeing a skateboard and being infatuated by it?

JAHMIR — The first time I saw a skateboard, yo, it’s crazy, cuz I didn’t see skating in person for the first time. I saw it on Tony Hawk pro skater. I bought this video game, It was like Star wars. As you know, it’s expensive. It’s a $60 game. I knew I could get my full refund back in 48 hours if I returned it. I beat it in one day with some help from my uncle’s friend, and we took it back and got three games. I got Tony Hawk pro skater, and a few other games. All used games, basically. But when I got home, the first game I popped in was Tony Hawk Pro skater. I remember instantly wanting to be a skateboarder and wanting one to try and do the tricks they were doing in the game. All the little mini parts they would drop. It’d be a snippet of Andrew Reynolds or a snippet of this person or that person throughout the game. It was eye opening because I’d never seen that before. Instantaneously, I was like, that’s what I want to do with the rest of my life. I was about five years old when that happened. Most of my early inspiration just came from Tony Hawk pro skater because I wasn’t really allowed to leave my neighborhood. It was a really rough neighborhood in southwest Philadelphia. A lot of gun violence and real gnarly stuff going on where I was from. So my family kept me close to home as best they could. It was really just the game that kept me attracted to skateboarding for the first 5 years. The Tony Hawk games led to me finding out about Love Park and realizing it was in my city. Seeing the city hall building in the video game. From where I was in southwest Philly, looking through the projects and over the Schuylkill river, you could see downtown Philly. So I was like, “Wow, it’s not that far.” So after 5 years of not leaving the neighborhood, eventually I started making my way, sneaking out downtown and hanging out with other skateboarders for the first time.

IGOR — Top 5 skateboarders past and/or present you draw inspiration from?

JAHMIR — I mean, as a kid, there was a lot of people skating in Philly, so there was a lot of different people that I looked up to at that time. Once I started getting downtown, being around and starting to be a part of the scene, a lot of those guys were my favorite skateboarders at that point. I loved watching Brian Douglas and Dylan Sourbeer. Getting to skate with Kevin Bilyeu all the time and becoming good friends with him, that became one of my number one motivators and inspirations to take skating a little more serious. So it was just my friends, really. A lot of the styles that we were doing, wearing super big track pants and stuff like that, it was just early inspirations that we had from playing video games and growing up in what was still an earlier part of skateboarding in the early two thousands. Growing up in a special time in skateboarding, we were inspired by all kinds of things. I guess if I had to name one more skateboarder, it would be Josh Kalis. Getting to see what he did in those videos as a kid, it was amazing. Seeing how much he helped us and continues to push skateboarding in his own way is amazing. It’s something that you would hope to see for yourself. That’s big shoes to fill, but in your own way, and, you know, we’re in our own time. I just want to go as far as I can with my dream and keep fighting for the things that I believe in, because I saw those guys do it.

IGOR — How did coming up in Philly inspire your professional skateboarding trajectory? Did you always have this idea of skateboarding for a living?

JAHMIR — When I was 5, I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. But, you know, that’s not really realistic for a black kid coming from the hood of southwest Philly. But, I fought for it time and time again. I just tried to be a better person and better skateboarder, learn all the tricks I could. And when I found community, I tried to be a part of that community as best I could and fix the spots and get the tricks on the spots and make sure you film parts and just try to be a part of something that was bigger than myself. The more I was able to do that, the more professional skateboarding seemed like an option. After having such motivation watching Kevin get sponsored and start to get success, I wanted the same for myself. Gratefully enough, it ended up happening. For the last five years, I’ve been able to skateboard for a living, and it’s been a dream come true.

IGOR — What’s the best thing about Philly? And what do you dislike about it?

JAHMIR — The best thing about Philly is the community. Whatever you’re into, if you want to hang out and make art, you can find people that are like minded. It’s going to be small, but it’s going to be real, it’s going to be raw. I found that through skateboarding, music, photography and numerous different things that I’m into. And it’s still going to be weird at times. It’s going to be not what you think at times, but it all works out in the end. As long as you have some hustle under your belt and you got work ethic, I feel like you’ll get something from it. At the end of the day, as long as you put 300% in, you’re bound to at least get 50% back. It’s just all about how much you want it. And I wanted it really bad, so I accepted nothing for years to get where I needed to be. You gotta make plans and you gotta work according to your plans. They adapt to your plans, they change, but, you know, try to keep the same end goals. The things I dislike about Philly is the lack of resources. There’s a lack of resources for how good the communities can be here. And if we had more resources, then who knows how Philly would be. We controlled music for years, we were the capital of the United States. People here are strong, resilient people. And if we had more resources and opportunities, then people probably wouldn’t go to New York or LA no more. They’d just come here. But that’s a different lifetime, right?

IGOR — Having a creative outlet has always been a driving force for pro skateboarders. Would you say that DJing and mixing music is your creative outlet?

JAHMIR — I mean, yeah, I got into music during 7 months of being hurt. It allowed me to express myself in a different way. I have different multimedia formats where I like to express myself. Skateboarding, photography, creative design and direction for brands. There’s a lot of things that I’ve done for other companies that people don’t know of because my name isn’t necessarily on the number one billboard or whatever, but behind the scenes, I’ve been doing a lot of work to help out with different projects and events.

IGOR — Outside of skateboarding, what are you inspired by daily? People, places, environments, hobbies, etc?

JAHMIR — I’m pretty simple man. I ride my bike, I’ll make some music. I spend a lot of time alone, so I have a lot of time to reflect and think about my life, where I want to be, what I’ve done, where I have been, and, you know, just kind of continue to make these same little plans and goals of who am I and where I want to be with my life? You only get one. So when I’m gone, how do I want to be remembered? That’s kind of how I think about my life. What are all the things that I want to do? Coming from someone that had heart surgery and has a heart condition, I’ve had to think about the dark times of my life and to overcome that, I made plans. And now it’s kind of just keeping that going, keeping the same energy of having fun, living day to day like it’s my last, but also reassuring that it’s not, and doing what you can to protect your comfortability in life, your lifestyle. I’ve built a comfortable lifestyle with pro skateboarding, and now I’m basically doing everything I can to keep up with it.

IGOR — How did the conversation with Palace start, and what drew you to the brand?

JAHMIR — Basically, I was skating for DGK still. Jahmal hit me up. We were skating Muni together one day. This was probably, like, 2018. He’s like, “Yo, would you want to skate for Palace ever?”And I was like, “Hell, yeah, I would.” That was it, I wasn’t expecting anything. It was just a conversation. Fast forward to spring of 2020 and we had some differences come up, and it took me to a place where I just didn’t really want to skateboard anymore, so I was kind of off it. I already had became friends with Chewy Cannon and Brooks over at Palace. Those guys became my really good friends, and we would talk all the time. When I told them about what was going on, I asked them if they could send me a board every now and then just so I could continue to have fun with it, but not take it too serious and not have to spend too much money on it, you know, skateboarding was getting expensive. When I was a kid, boards were $40, $50, not $80. So it’s like, if I was going to go back to working a job again, it was going to be a lot of money to try to keep up with the things that I wanted to do, knowing what jobs I was going to go back to doing at that time. So they gave me a chance. They said, send us some footage. Footage was good. They were like, “Jah, you’re too good for just a board every now and then.” And they allowed me to try out for the team. I skated the boards for about a month or two, and I put out a part on Thrasher, and that’s when things kind of changed, and they were just like, “Yeah, you’re on the team and you’re good.” Ever since then, it’s been me and the family. That’s what it is. Those guys are family. We’ve looked out for each other and continue to have support like no other. I’m grateful to be over there, man.

Photos: Franklin Carbonatti

Interview: Igor Ehretskyy

Full interview, featured in Issue 8, Living Proof Magazine.