Jharrel Jerome, who portrayed Korey Wise in the 4-part Netflix series "When They See Us," won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series at last night's ceremony and he deserved it.
Jerome also made history as the first Afro-Latino to win an Emmy and he's only 21 years old.
In his emotional speech, he thanked his mother and other family members and friends, writer and director Ava DuVernay, his co-stars, and the five men who the series was about, the Exonerated 5: Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kevin Richardson.
Those five lost the chance to be children because they were falsely accused of beating and raping a woman, when they weren't even close to the crime scene and later on, the real abuser came forward and admitted to his wrongdoing, but that didn't change the fact that Wise, McCray, Santana, Salaam, and Richardson were already disgraced and their lives would never be the same again.
Now, those same five boys who were accused of a crime they didn't commit in 1989 are being dressed by fashion designers and attending awards shows.
There will always be scars from their time in prison that time may never heal, thanks to Linda Fairstein and Elizabeth Lederer, but they're slowly finding peace in what happened to them and are ensuring that what happened to them never happens to black boys and girls again.
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Korey's story was the most heartbreaking of them all because he was tried as an adult, so instead of going to a juvenile detention center like the other four, he went to federal prison.
Wise spent time in Riker's Island, a notoriously bad prison, where he was on the receiving end of abuse from inmates and wardens before requesting to be sent to solitary confinement and then asking for a transfer to another prison.
He made a friend in the white warden at his new prison, this warden gave Wise a job in the prison to get him out of solitary and the chance to walk around without being confined to those four small walls of a cell.
Wise eventually stopped showing up to his own probation hearings because they wanted him to admit to doing the rape and assault, he refused to admit to something he didn't do and stayed in prison for years.
He dealt with the passing of his sister while he was in jail. His mother lost friends. Wise had the roughest story and Jharrel Jerome portrayed his story beautifully, which is why he deserved his Emmy.