On June 1, 1937, Mayme Edna Revere Freeman and Morgan Porterfield Freeman Sr. welcomed their newest son Morgan Freeman Jr. to the family. He was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and his parents moved north to Chicago when he was 2 years old, leaving him in the care of his grandmother in Mississippi. They moved to look for better economic prospects, as the South at that time was still soaked in legal racism, limiting their job opportunities.
For the next four years, Morgan Jr. grew up in Mississippi at a time when Jim Crow Laws were still on the books. Some of these laws included it being illegal to write about social equality between Black and white residents, interracial marriage being illegal, and the educational system was also horribly unequal, too. In some school districts, the legislature deliberately underfunded schools that Black children like Morgan Jr. attended, purposefully only giving them money to stay open for four months instead of the traditional nine.
Read Related Also: The George Santos Calamity
The school that Morgan Jr. attended in Greenwood, Mississippi, when he was 6 was so underfunded it only had one room (via Gina DeAngelis in “Morgan Freeman”). Freeman recalled that Mississippi was a “society that was purposefully, obviously, openly segregated,” but said his youthful ignorance partially insulated him from the realities of racism (via Kathleen Tracy in “Morgan Freeman: A Biography”). Freeman would soon leave Jim Crow and move north, but his childhood in Mississippi certainly impacted his life.
