Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Charles S. Dutton" in English language version.
Instead of snowball battles in my neighborhood, we used to have rock fights. We'd make little forts out of cardboard and trash cans, and throw rocks at each other on the other side of the street. Once your fort was knocked down, you had to go out and charge the other guys with a handful of rocks. I used to lead the charge, and I'd get hit badly. At least twice a month I'd get my head busted and they started calling me 'Rockhead.' Then I used to box for a while, and they took the 'head' off, and just called me 'Roc.' People still call me 'Roc.'
Dutton's jail-to-Yale biography is a compelling one. After getting out of prison in 1976, he spent two years studying theater at Towson State University and then went on to earn a drama degree from Yale before going to Broadway.
'I was in the Black Panther Party in the 1960s, raised hell in the streets and spent 12 years in and out the penal institution, seven and a half the last time.'
Dutton got his GED and completed a couple of college acting programs before finally earning his master's from Yale. And he hit the ground running. 'When I graduated out of Yale School of Drama in 1983, I didn't really have a long struggling actor career...
Dutton grew up in the Latrobe Homes housing projects in Baltimore. His childhood bedroom overlooked the Maryland Penitentiary, an imposing and dark gothic structure built in the early 1800s.
When he was seventeen, Dutton was involved in a street fight that escalated into a knife fight. He and his assailant stabbed each other. Only Dutton survived. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years of imprisonment. Dutton was out on parole for only a few months when he returned to prison for possession of a deadly weapon (a handgun). When a prison riot broke out, Dutton participated and punched a guard. He was sentenced to an additional eight years of imprisonment. "I knew what I was doing," he says. "For a long time I didn't want to hear anything positive. I just wanted to know when we were going to burn down the prison."
My manslaughter conviction came from a fight with a guy who stabbed me seven times. I wrestled the knife from him and killed him. Got 18 months (in 1967). Then got three years for possession of a weapon and another eight years tacked on for a fight with a guard.
In and out of reform school and prison since he was 12, Dutton received his parole on Aug. 20, 1976, and closed the door on his old life.
What had saved Charles Dutton was prison. He dropped out of school at 12 and pleaded guilty to manslaughter at 17, after stabbing a black man who had pulled a knife on him in a fight. He served two years. Then he was sent back for weapons possession, fought with a white guard, and ended up serving another seven and a half.
This August will mark the 20th anniversary of actor Charles Dutton's release from the Maryland State Penitentiary, where he spent seven-and-a-half years for manslaughter and other charges.
Dutton's parents divorced when he was 4. He was raised by his mother, who cleaned houses and proudly refused to accept welfare to feed her three children.
In 1967, at age 16, he got into a street fight with a man in his twenties. He stabbed the man repeatedly. The man bled to death, and Dutton was sentenced to five years at the state prison in Jessup for manslaughter.
Not long after being released, he was arrested again, on robbery and weapons charges. A conviction on the latter count earned him a three-year sentence in the Maryland State Pen, the institution that stood outside his old bedroom window.
One day a guard kept him from seeing a visitor. Enraged, Dutton challenged him to a fistfight. As Dutton describes it, they had 'a wonderful, nice 10 minutes busting each other up' in a locked room. Dutton figured it was a fair fight. But the guard eventually pressed charges ('he was pressured to do so,' Dutton claims). The conviction earned Dutton eight more years in prison. He is bitterly amused by this: 'I got three years for killing a black man and eight for punching a white man.'
...a fellow con stabbed Dutton in the neck with an ice pick. The blade plunged into his lungs, collapsing one of them, but missing his arteries. Still, he nearly bled to death. The injury only stoked his rage. He had become a fire-breathing radical, a Black Panther who read Mao, Marx and Malcolm X and 'believed wholeheartedly in the armed overthrow of the U.S. government. I was prepared to die for it.'
Not long afterward, he refused to accept an assignment cleaning toilets, and was banished to isolation for three days. There, in a dim 5-by-7-foot cell, Dutton read a book of plays he'd found in the prison library. He was transfixed, transported and ultimately transformed.
Dutton's parents divorced when he was 4. He was raised by his mother, who cleaned houses and proudly refused to accept welfare to feed her three children.
Instead of snowball battles in my neighborhood, we used to have rock fights. We'd make little forts out of cardboard and trash cans, and throw rocks at each other on the other side of the street. Once your fort was knocked down, you had to go out and charge the other guys with a handful of rocks. I used to lead the charge, and I'd get hit badly. At least twice a month I'd get my head busted and they started calling me 'Rockhead.' Then I used to box for a while, and they took the 'head' off, and just called me 'Roc.' People still call me 'Roc.'
