A Success Story From Harlem Javier Sarmiento   © Copyright 2024 by Javier Sarmiento

Image by Aleksandr Schukin from Pixabay

My name is Javier Sarmiento and this is my story.

I grew up in one of the less glamorous parts of New York City; Harlem. As a young black man from a disadvantaged neighborhood, the odds were already stacked against me. Instead of letting those determine my fate, I decided to make the most of the life I had been given and make a future for myself.

I realized early that the only weapon I had to succeed in life was my mind, so I constantly tried to develop it. Unlike most of my classmates who didn’t care for college, I was determined to go to college. I had always loved writing, and I felt studying something that honed this skill in college would not only give me a chance to do something I loved, but I knew I could also affect lives. And boy did I have stories to write.

When people hear of Harlem, people think of drug dealers, drive-by shootings, and gang members. So do the police. Harlem is one of the most over-policed places in the United States. I know with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, issues of racial profiling and police brutality have come to national consciousness, but we have been witnesses to this part of the police for a long time.

I remember a while back; I was walking down the block when a young black man ran past me with a cop on his heels. I can recall I was on my way back from school when this incident occurred. The young man ran into my building, where the cop finally caught up with him and cuffed him. Scenes like this were a daily occurrence, so I wasn’t interested. That was until the cop cuffed the man, and decided to beat him unconscious with his baton.

When the cop noticed I had witnessed the whole thing, he casually told me to keep moving or I would be next. I was determined to leave that sort of life behind. I was tired of being thought of as a criminal because I was black and Hispanic (I’m proudly both). My only escape was writing. I was determined to have a career in the media and tell these stories that many have overlooked. Give a voice to these people who deserve to have their sides of the stories told to the world.

From the onset, I knew going to college was going to be one of the hardest things I was ever going to do. I didn’t have the financial means to sponsor myself through college, so I had to depend on scholarships. I knew getting scholarships wasn’t going to be easy, but I was determined. I needed to break out of that mold that society had put young people like me in. I wanted to be the outlier, the exception to the racial stereotype, and do the unexpected. This desire fueled my ambition, I was determined not to be part of the trend.

Despite my determination, things didn’t go according to plan from the beginning. First, I couldn’t attend the college of my choice, because I failed to win any scholarships. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t devastated; I had put so much hope into going to college that I hadn’t even considered other options. As if that wasn’t enough, the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

New York had come under a strict lockdown due to the pandemic, so when I got an admission into junior college I couldn’t go to campus. As a young active man, I found staying in a room for most of the day a recipe for losing my mind. There was only so much binge-watching I could do.

At first, I was on the verge of depression, not partaking in physical activity was beginning to take its toll on my mind. Then I started to write. I wrote about everything my mind could cook up; fiction, sports, poetry, I even wrote some screenplays. The writing was the release I needed, it helped me go through a very dark period in my life.

It was the elixir that I needed for the heartbreaking news that I wouldn't be able to take my basketball career any further than high school. Basketball had been one of my passions, I have been dreaming of playing college basketball but the pandemic put paid to that.

 The first ray of light was the prizes I started to receive for my writings. I hadn’t thought much about my writings when I submitted them, but to my surprise, I started getting calls and recognition. The first one was my poem, A Voice of Harlem getting an honorable mention in the Annual Writers’ Digest Writing Competition. The recognition gave me the boost I needed, I knew I was doing something right, and continued writing.

After junior college, I got an offer to study liberal arts at the Guttman Community College. At college, I combined my two loves; basketball and writing and became a sports writer. From there, I moved to Buena Vista University to study digital media.

My sports writing went up a notch, and I began to gain national recognition. My article on LeBron James won me in the collegiate sports writing category of the Robert L. Vann Media Awards. I also joined prestigious journalistic bodies, National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ).

More importantly, my activities in college won me fourteen (14) different scholarships. No one in the history of Harlem had achieved anything close. From someone that had grown from Harlem, where no one was expected to go beyond high school.

The icing on the cake was when I got a call from the university newspaper. They wanted their best journalist to interview, and get to record my journey so far. As I sat down for the interview, I thought of how far I had come and how I had almost given up.

The only thing that got me where I am today is determination. More importantly, if I can do it, so can you.