Washington spent his early years working in a barbershop and with The Boys & Girls Club of America (then called Boys Club). When his parents started drifting apart, he began acting out and getting into fights in school. 

After his parents divorced, Washington's mother sent him to a private boy's high school and he said it was one of the best things that could have happened to him. 

"I wouldn’t have survived in the direction I was going," Denzel told Parade magazine in 1999. "The guys I was hanging out with at the time, my running buddies, have now done maybe 40 years combined in the penitentiary. They were nice guys, but the streets got them."