Giving DC Its Flowers

Website: Black Flower Market 

Instagram: @blkflwrmrkt

Articles:

• First-ever BLK Market event showcases variety of Black-owned businesses in Richmond
• This Washingtonian florist is giving bouquets to families of homicide victims

Kehmari’s Book Recommendation: Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia E. Butler

Reggie Rucker:

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Building Local Power. I am your co-host, Reggie Rucker, back with my co-host Luke Gannon. What’s up, Luke?

Luke Gannon:

Hey, Reggie. Oh my God, it is great to be back and even greater to be spending this season in your neck of the woods.

Reggie Rucker:

So it’s funny that you say that because I actually still don’t feel quite right about calling DC home. I’ve been here for a few years now, but still I very much feel like a gentrifier. I just put it out there and actually, as you know, I just wrapped up my thesis on gentrification as looking at how small business lending is associated with gentrification. But that’s another topic for another day. Point is, I don’t think I can call it like my neck of the woods. I can’t call this place mine.

Luke Gannon:

Yeah, okay. I mean, that’s fair. When I usually ask you about home, you go straight to talking about Modesto, so I get that you feel that way, but I really need to read your thesis and we definitely got to have another conversation on this.

Reggie Rucker:

The good news is we do have an amazing lineup of shows ahead where we are getting to talk to folks from DC who have been doing work in this community for years to make it the special place that it is. It’s the community leaders, the advocates, activists, entrepreneurs, social and otherwise who have these really powerful stories about the drive to write DC’s next chapter. We think these stories will be illuminating in their own right, but as always, we hope that they also inspire you on your journey to build local power wherever you’re listening from. And with this episode, it was such a privilege to start this series with Kehmari Norman. She’s the founder of Black Flower Market, and if you’re in DC or the DC area, even if you’re not, follow her on Instagram immediately and we’ll put the links in the show notes. But this was special.

Luke Gannon:

As Reggie mentioned in our very first DC episode, we are talking about flowers, Black culture, and of course, DC. Today on the show, we are welcoming Kehmari Norman, who owns and operates the Black Flower Market, which is a flower shop in Washington DC that hosts pop-up shops and workshops, exploring medicinal and cultural context of florals. Here’s Kehmari.

Kehmari Norman:

My name is Kehmari. I’m the owner and founder of Black Flower Market, and I started my business in 2018. I’m born and raised in Washington DC and I started my career in environmentalism as a student at Temple University. Graduated from DC Public Schools in 2011, I’ve always been a scholar and an excellent student Since daycare. I’m the first college graduate in my immediate family. I wasn’t interested in taking an easy route for my life. I’m a fourth generation Washingtonian, and so DC is very near to my identity and my family’s identity. I didn’t need to create a reason to want to give back or come back or to love the city.

The city is very much a part of me and my upbringing. I graduated from Temple University in 2015 with a degree in theater and concentration in set design, and most of my experience as a college student was not in theaters or in stage arenas, but predominantly in green spaces where I’d activate my design skills and place them into gardens or cityscapes, for example. And that trajectory led me to an internship with the Smithsonian’s Horticulture division, and that was my reintroduction back home in 2016.

Luke Gannon:

Kehmari developed her relationship with flowers through environmentalism while attending Temple University in Philadelphia.

Kehmari Norman:

As a sophomore at Temple University, a friend of mine had introduced to me his non-profit concepts and ideas. He started a profit called Philly Urban Creators, which is still in existence today. And at that sound stage of the organization, the goal was to communicate and react to or respond to gentrification and demolition in Philadelphia and North Philadelphia primarily. And we offered a space for me to manage. We were pretty much strangers at that point, but the energy was felt. I was a part of a Black philosophy club as a student at Temple, and we were relatively organized, so much so that we caught the attention of Alex, and initially he offered all of us, the Black philosophy group, a garden space for us to collectively manage.

I was the only one of the group that took him up on the invitation, and at that point, I didn’t have any gardening, floristry or farming skills, but I have been a designer for quite some time, and so I took on the project to design the space through a landscaping and agricultural perspective. Philadelphia, North Philly is a town of row homes, and so the image throughout North Philly was like these gaps in neighborhoods where a house would be demolished due to renovation or gentrification or something. So our goal was to transform those gaps that ultimately became landfill spaces and transformed them into green oases and just practicing design skills and activating this space ultimately had to learn how to take care of it after designing it and activating it with community events and festivals and people.

So I initially grew and I still do grow produce primarily, and through the act of cultivating crops and land stewardship, I gained mentors and a world of perspective about careers in environmentalism and floristry found me with my internship at the Smithsonian. One of my mentors, he created and curated the flowers for the Freer Gallery and other Smithsonian museums. And so as a mentee, I would go with him almost every day, 4:00 A.M., 5:00 AM in the floral home shops and just learning the basics through shadowing. Through that like revelation and that experience, I decided to start my own floral design business.

Luke Gannon:

Floristry found Kehmari and her passion had a ripple effect where she built relationships with people who were following their dreams, creating health and wellness by and for Black people.

Kehmari Norman:

Relationships are everyone’s strongest currency. For me personally, it was about staying true to myself and what I want, not necessarily aiming to do it all or be everything to everyone. So for example, I know my strengths, and I know coming back to DC that one of my strengths was the community that I’ve developed in Philadelphia as a Black gardener, as a Black land steward. Just going back to Philadelphia, I just knew what I wanted and I know what I was extremely passionate about. So even before Alex Epstein, the founder of Philly Urban Creators, before he offered the opportunity to manage a space, a garden space, or a lot rather, at that point, I was already in a space of health and wellness from an African perspective and the Pan African perspective. So all my life, I’ve been an avid reader, and at that point in time, I was incredibly inspired by herbalists and activists like Dr. Sabie, a friend of mine, his older sister, was studying under Dr. Sabie in Miami, and just the powerful influence of herbs, policy and culture, I was enamored in it all.

And so I knew even as a student studying theater and not necessarily knowing where my life would turn out, I knew what I liked and so when an opportunity was brought to me to start a garden, I just found it a blessing and yeah, a true blessing for me to act on some of my interests. So while I was reading and researching herbalists, I could actually put the things that I was researching into play and do it myself. I knew my strengths, I knew what I wanted to do, and that helped me to identify other people who also knew their own strengths and know what they wanted to do. So we’re not aiming to do it all, but we’re just doing what we like in this space together.

Luke Gannon:

One of Kehmari’s missions is to bridge the gap between culture and flora culture. One of the ways she actualizes this is in the Smudge Stick Workshops she holds.

Kehmari Norman:

Bridging the gap between people’s culture and flora culture is actualized in the business through experiences and engagements, but ultimately what I mean by that saying by bridging people’s culture and flora culture is to allow us to see ourselves as a community through the things that we use and the things that we do. So for example, in the Smudge Stick lab, which is a offering that I host, there’s a space where we just talk with one another and folks get to understand and learn that while they may seem like polar opposites, whether it’s via age or the way they look or income or whatever, different binaries, no matter how seemingly opposite they can be, they’ll tell a story about how their grandmothers used basil for something in particular, or their parents used a certain herb or flower for specific ailments, and it allows a cultural immersion and a meeting of the minds and essentially for folks to let their shoulders down and see more commonalities than differences.

I grew up in a space where Black success was really normalized. It wasn’t like the exception or something outstanding. It was really the culture. So growing up, my orthodontists, my dentists, my doctors, policymakers, all of these people were Black. And so I guess when I came back home in 2016 to DC, it was like this phenomenon of Black Lives Matter and all of this social stuff happening that platform Black people. And it was just like, “Oh, okay. Now the world is catching up”, because this is just our life or the life of those who lived in DC in the nineties and prior. There’s lots of culture in the District of Columbia and my role and my colleague’s role, what we want to do is just maintain a sense of chocolate city. So everything that I do has a race-first perspective.

Luke Gannon:

Kehmari has been cultivating spaces with a focus on horticulture and floristry for over 10 years. She’s faced some personal challenges in the process.

Kehmari Norman:

My personal challenges has been just learning the ropes, honestly. Again, I’m a first generation college graduate and first-time entrepreneur in my family, and so a lot of things that I just don’t know and learning as I go and lending, like loans and things from financial institutions, honestly, just the basics of financial entrepreneurship, well, the basics in finances within entrepreneurship and time management. Again, I just can’t emphasize enough the nuances of being a first-time college graduate, and a lot of spaces, a rare high school graduate in my family. And so that has been a personal challenge for me.

Luke Gannon:

Every day, Kehmari is reminded of why she loves the work she is doing.

Kehmari Norman:

I’m a servant to my community. I have a full-time job where I create environmental events throughout the district. So I may be teaching young people how to grow their own food or just simply holding a conversation with a peer of mine, holding a safe space to not code switch or to just simply be. Those are the moments where I can identify with that sentiment.

True self-reliance is being a servant to your community, having a conversation with your communities of a super grassroots perspective and energy, how can you be of service? And that doesn’t mean how can you give money or give anything outside of who you are. Maybe tapping into your strengths. I know what I’m good at.

Luke Gannon:

Here’s Kehmari’s incredible book recommendation.

Kehmari Norman:

I would suggest Octavia Butler’s Blood Child. It’s an anthology of short stories, and it’s essentially a great book of advice.

Luke Gannon:

Thank you, Kehmari, for being on the show and for sharing your work, knowledge and love with DC and beyond. Please do check out Kehmari’s Instagram located in the show notes.

Reggie Rucker:

Luke, thank you and great job bringing us this story. As always, Kehmari, I was trying to avoid this all episode, but it is really fitting. You are so beautifully rooted and grounded in who you are and what you want for yourself and your community. I really just want to thank you for sharing that presence with us. And thanks to all of you, our listeners for tuning in. We’ll be back again in two weeks with another episode out of DC, the 51st State.

But in the meantime, check out the show notes from today’s episode to dive deeper into what we discussed today. And as always, you can visit archive.ilsr.org for more on our work to fight corporate control and build local power. And our emails are always open, buildinglocalpower@archive.ilsr.org. Let us know what’s on your mind. Maybe it’s a future city we should consider going to, who else we should talk to in DC or elsewhere. We’d love to hear from you. This show is produced by Luke Gannon and me, Reggie Rucker. The podcast is edited by Luke Gannon and Téa Noelle. The music for the season is also composed by Téa Noelle. Thank you so much for listening to Building Local Power.