Rubin Carter was born in Clifton, N.J. on May 6, 1937. As he was reportedly bullied as a kid he was forced to learn from an early age to use his fists. Although his boxing career was great he is mostly known by the world for his life story. Being wrongly accused of a triple murder, Carter was sentenced after his 1967 trial by an all-white jury largely based on the testimony of two small-time criminals.
Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter and his friend John Artis who was with him during the night in which the killings took place were both sent to jail where they spent close to 20 years of their life. The two were released after a federal judge ruled in 1985 that they did not receive fair trials. The story of Rubin Carter was put into film and song. It became widely known soon after Bob Dylan wrote the eight-and-a-half-minute song Hurricane which dramatized Mr. Carter’s cause in 1975.
