On this day in New York · December 28, 1954
Denzel Washington Is Born in Mount Vernon
A preacher's son from a Westchester suburb grows up to win two Oscars and become the biggest movie star this city ever produced.
The facts
- Born
- December 28, 1954, Mount Vernon, New York
- Father
- Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., Pentecostal minister, also worked for the NYC Water Department and at S. Klein department store
- Mother
- Lennis "Lynne" (Lowe) Washington, beauty parlor owner, born in Georgia, partly raised in Harlem
- Oscars
- Best Supporting Actor for Glory (1989); Best Actor for Training Day (2001), the second Black actor to win the category, after Sidney Poitier
Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. was born on December 28, 1954, in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb just north of the Bronx in Westchester County. His father, Denzel Sr., was an ordained Pentecostal minister who also worked for the New York City Water Department and at a local S. Klein department store to help support the family. His mother, Lennis, known as Lynne, ran a beauty parlor; she was born in Georgia and grew up partly in Harlem before settling in Mount Vernon. Washington's parents split when he was 14, a rupture that sent him away from the neighborhood and, by his own account later, away from a much rockier path.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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That decision changed my life, because I wouldn't have survived in the direction I was going. The guys I was hanging out with at the time, my running buddies, have now done maybe 40 years combined in the penitentiary.
Denzel Washington, on his mother sending him to Oakland Military Academy after his parents' divorce
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Washington is proof a Westchester suburb, not just Manhattan, can produce a movie star of the first order, and that the break his mother forced on him at 14 is the reason there was a career to have at all.
Sources
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