Tennessee
Formerly unhoused LA teen settles into college life in Tennessee
From unhoused to HBCU: Catching up with Jeremiah Armstead
FOX 11 caught up with Jeremiah Armstead, the homeless teen basketball participant who now performs faculty hoops for Fisk in Nashville.
LOS ANGELES – Dorm curfew is midnight… new guidelines for a school child who spent a lot of his highschool years unhoused.
Jeremiah Armstead is an 18-year-old whose life route modified in a single day when a group got here collectively in Los Angeles to ship him to varsity. He landed at Fisk College in Tennessee.
FOX 11 was the primary to report on Armstead; and Christine Devine paid a go to to him in Nashville simply weeks into the autumn semester.
In August, Armstead was residing in a automobile together with his mom, youthful sister, and brother. The household discovered a secure place via the ‘Do Good Daniels Household Basis’ who function a home violence shelter. The non-profit ‘Sisters of Watts’ stepped in and noticed a greater future for him.
They launched a fundraising effort to pay for faculty and reached out to ‘We Educate Sensible Minds’ which works to get interior metropolis children into HBCUs, Traditionally Black Faculties, like Fisk.
Armstead says he spent a lot of his highschool years unhoused together with his household shifting from shelters and housing places, even staying of their automobile. He spent his final 12 months at Lengthy Seashore Poly Excessive College and graduated in 2022, the place he was the middle on the basketball crew.
He is now a Fiskite and on the basketball crew in Nashville. The coach is former NBA participant Kenny Anderson, a one-time Los Angeles Clipper. At 6’5ft, Armstead discovered a love of basketball when he was 14-years-old.
A spotlight for me was assembly his teammates on the college cafeteria! Scholar Physique President,Daikerra Sweat, gave us a tour of campus and shared her data of the historical past of the varsity which was based in 1866. It is house to Nashville’s oldest constructing, she says.
In a extra haunting second that may follow me… she shared the heartbreaking historical past of the KKK and a bell on campus that might alert college students and college that the Ku Klux Klan was coming.
The bell is now rung when Fisk College wins a basketball or volleyball recreation.
Again to his dorm room the place you will discover Armstead lives by religion and retains a bible on his desk. It is stored open on the e-book of Jeremiah. He attends service in Nashville every Sunday with a household that has taken him beneath their wing.
Armstead says he is having fun with the southern hospitality and says everybody has been welcoming. He says he talks by cellphone together with his mother each day.