Phonte Coleman, known professionally as Phonte, reflected on the music, people and places that shaped him during SpeakerBox at the Hayti Heritage Center on Sept. 18. 

Phonte, a rapper, singer and member of the hip-hop group Little Brother, appeared as part of SpeakerBox, a series where artists discuss the songs and stories that have influenced them. 

Throughout the night, Phonte shared childhood memories and early musical influences to his relationship with Durham. After the event, he also spoke about the importance of preserving accessible spaces where artists can gather, experiment and learn from one another. 

“You have to have a place where you can get it wrong, because until you get it wrong, you’re not gonna get it right,” Phonte said.

It was Phonte’s first time participating in a SpeakerBox event.

“It’s not a concert, it’s a conversation,” Monèt Noelle Marshall, artistic director of the Hayti Heritage Center, told the audience. 

Phonte’s stories about church, grandmothers and growing up around older relatives drew laughter from the crowd. At times, the concert felt more like a family gathering.

“Being able to play records in the church is, you know, like my past meeting my present,” Phonte said. 

Growing up surrounded by music long before he made a career out of it, Phonte said his grandparents met at a record store, where his grandmother worked and his grandfather shopped. At family parties, Phonte would DJ using his aunt’s turntable and records.

“You dig with your ears,” Phonte told the audience. “If you aren’t really listening, you don’t know what you got.” 

One of Phonte’s early musical influences came from “The Color Purple,” in which he acted as an extra.

Phonte said he was about 6 or 7 years old when he was an extra in the film. He said the soundtrack  had a lasting impact on him, saying it moved his mind.

Years later, he brought that music with him to Hayti. 

As Phonte played Táta Vega’s “God Is Trying to Tell You Something,” the song filled the sanctuary as audience members closed their eyes, clapped, sang along and swayed in their seats.

As Phonte played a song by gospel group Take 6, the music permeated through the church.

“I don’t know how you don’t feel emotion,” he said.

The building itself carries its own history within Durham’s Black community. 

Rev. Edian Markham, a formerly enslaved African Methodist Episcopal missionary, founded the congregation that became St. Joseph’s AME Church. Built in the early 1890s, the brick sanctuary now serves as the Hayti Heritage Center.

The surrounding Hayti neighborhood became a center for Black business, culture and religious life in Durham. Urban renewal projects and construction of the Durham Freeway in the 1960s and 1970s displaced residents and businesses and divided the neighborhood.

After the congregation relocated, community members stepped in to establish the St. Joseph’s Historic Foundation in 1975. This helped turn the space into a center for Black culture, arts and community programming.

Phonte said performing in the historic space made him feel part of the generations that came before him. 

“It just makes me feel very blessed, fortunate,” he said. “And, you know, to be another kind of link in that chain.”

He described the night as part of a broader tradition of “uplifting Black music, Black culture.”

Phonte’s relationship with Durham began in 1997, when he started attending North Carolina Central University. 

Phonte said Durham has “a lot more” now, including the rise of tech companies, but he still sees the city as a blue-collar town.

“The thing that I took from Durham was just a very blue-collar work ethic, a blue-collar approach to my career,” he said. 

“People go to work here,” Phonte said. “And in my career, that was the way I always approached it. I’m going to work. I’m here to do my job. And just don’t complain, just get it done.”

Phonte said keeping creative spaces accessible is essential to preserving Durham’s creative culture.  

“It has to be a place — it can’t be, you know, you gotta have X amount of dollars or whatever,” he said. “It’s like, no, this is a place you can gather.”

Later in the night, Phonte watched younger audience members connect with music that had been meaningful to earlier generations.

“The stuff y’all turn up to now, this is what our parents and grandparents was turning up to back then,” he said. “This was the music of then, but the spirit was still there.”

Phonte said music is what carries across generations.

“It don’t matter what year it was,” he said. “The drum is the drum. The drum is universal.”

For him, that rhythm carries through Black music over time.

“If you understand drums, you understand Black music.”

Edited by Andy Zhao and Gabe Thumm