Watch this Philly teen’s reaction to getting into college. He says he’s one of many success stories deserving of viral attention.

Karlynne Staten and her son Amir had just pulled up to their Germantown rowhome earlier this month when Amir glanced at a message on his iPhone before suddenly dropping the device, popping out of the car, and running screaming down the middle of the rain-soaked road.

“Let’s go!! Let’s go!! Let’s gooo!!” Amir shouted while clapping his hands.

It took a couple of beats for Karlynne to figure out what her son was hooting and hollering about as he ran back and forth, but she was able to figure it out soon enough: He’d just been accepted to Morehouse College, the celebrated, all-male historically Black college in Atlanta that counts among its alumni the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

At one point, in a video that Karlynne captured that has since gone viral, Amir pulls his camouflage hoodie tight around his face and, in near disbelief, says, “I got in! I got in!”

And then, in the part that nearly took me out, Amir runs toward his mother, near tears, shouting, “Mom, I got in …” before mother and son hug.

I lost count of the times I’ve watched the Feb. 16 video that has now been viewed and shared by hundreds of thousands of users on social media, including on Morehouse’s official accounts. A GoFundMe to help pay for Amir’s registration fees has also gotten a lot of support. He’s currently applying for scholarships to help pay his tuition and fees, which are roughly $50,000 for students who live on campus.

There are lots of sweet videos of students filming their acceptance into college — who isn’t touched by such heartfelt expressions of pure joy? — but Amir’s was made all the sweeter by the timing of the video, which garnered a wave of fresh interest this weekend.

Those 30 short seconds that Karlynne filmed felt like a gift to a city shrouded in sorrow.

The pain of collective grief is nothing new to Philadelphians. But after a week in which the city laid to rest a Temple University police officer who was killed on duty, and saw a 2-year-old girl wounded in a shooting in Strawberry Mansion, the burden of our shared anguish seemed a bit heavier than usual.

But there was something else, too. The video of Amir’s jubilation also stood in defiant contrast to the unbearable videos we’ve almost grown accustomed to, where Black men are often seen calling out for their mothers in their final moments.

Instead, here was a young Black man calling out to his mother in their shared triumph. After all, as I learned during a visit to their home on Sunday, this was as much her victory as it was his.

As a single mom who sometimes worked two or three jobs to care for Amir and his twin sister Angel, Karlynne conceded that the road to her children’s success wasn’t easy. But “life is limitless,” she taught them.

Times were hard, sacrifices were made, and Karlynne had to lean on a village of friends and family, some of whom were at her home when I stopped by.

“The thing is she kept that” — those hardships — “from us,” said Angel, while sitting in the living room of the family’s two-story brick rowhome gazing proudly at her mother and brother.

Karlynne, who was born and raised near the same Germantown neighborhood where the family now lives, knows all too well about the challenges of being a young person in Philadelphia.

Her 18-year-old godson, Nasir Roberson, was shot and killed in Port Richmond in 2021. As an emotional support case manager at Martin Luther King High School, Karlynne — who is getting her master’s in special education at Arcadia University — routinely works with young people at a crossroads.

In fact, her workday that Thursday had been so stressful that instead of staying later for an after-school program, she called Amir to pick her up.

They had been waiting on notifications from colleges. Howard University had deferred his admission, and when friends had already heard from Morehouse, the school that felt most like home when he visited in October, Amir grew worried.

Karlynne, on the other hand, had no doubt her son would get into a good college, where he hopes to study sociology. Amir was accepted into the community scholars program at Germantown Friends School in eighth grade. He’s a strong student who is the captain of his basketball team and a leader of his school’s Black student union club. (And Angel, an aspiring model, has enjoyed her own successes recently, too — she was on the runway during New York Fashion Week earlier this month.)

But Karlynne was not prepared for Amir’s reaction — “Get out of the street! Get out of the street!” she called to him — or the flood of responses that followed the video she first posted on Facebook for family and friends.

That unexpected moment, Amir told me, was packed with emotions, including relief that his mother’s sacrifices and his hard work had paid off.

And “knowing that I’m getting out of Philadelphia.”

Amir loves Philadelphia, but it’s felt like an increasingly unsafe place for young men his age — especially young men of color — and well, who can blame him?

“That’s not all the city is,” he said. But between his godbrother’s death and the sound of gunshots growing closer and closer to his home — there was a shooting nearby recently — Amir has grown fearful. He fears for the future of his city, and for countless other young people pursuing their dreams against unfair odds.

“There’s more …” he said. “Hundreds more kids in the city just like me, with some type of dream, some type of aspiration. They just need the same kind of opportunities.”