His Early Life
Morgan Freeman was born on June 1, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee. He was born to barber Morgan Porterfield Freeman, Sr. and schoolteacher Mayme Edna, Freeman was raised in Chicago and Mississippi in a low-income home. Not long after he was born, Morgan's parents, like so many other African-Americans struggling under the pressures of the Jim Crow south, relocated to Chicago to find work. While his parents looked for jobs, Freeman remained with his maternal grandmother in Charlestown, Mississippi. After the Death of his grandmother (when he was six years of age) he moved north to be with his mother. More moves followed, to Tennessee and eventually back to Mississippi, where Mayme Edna settled her family in Greenwood. During his childhood he went to see many movies in which he formed an early admiration for actors like Gary Cooper, Spenser Tracy and Sidney Poitier. He got into acting in junior high school. As punishment for pulling out a chair from underneath a girl he had a crush on, Freeman was ordered to participate in the school's drama competition. To his surprise, and probably school administrators, the 12-year-old proved to be an immediate natural on the stage, taking top honors in the program. Even though he loved acting, his dream had always been to be a fighter pilot. Once he finished high-school he turned down a partial drama scholarship and joined the U.S. Air Force. The military, though, proved to be much different than what he'd expected. Instead of darting around the skies, Freeman was relegated to on-the-ground activity as a mechanic and radar technician. He also realized that he didn't want to be shooting down other people. In 1959, Freeman left the Air Force and tried his fortunes out West, moving to Hollywood to see if he could make it as an actor. It wasn't an easy life. He took acting classes and struggled to find work. In the early 1960s, he moved again, this time to New York City, where more petty day jobs and nighttime auditions followed.
