Hurricane

Rubin Carter was a black American boxer who was known for knocking his opponents out early in the game with a single punch, leading to his nickname ‘Hurricane’.

Born in Clifton, New Jersey, on the sixth of May 1937 Carter was a street fighter and once attacked a man with a Boy Scout knife at age eleven or twelve. He claimed the man he stabbed was trying to molest him. As a result of this, he was sent away to Jamesburg State Home for Boys. He then ran away from there and went to his aunt’s home in Philadelphia.

While in Philadelphia, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in1954 and that was when his boxing career seriously began. After his discharge in 1956 for being unfit for service, he went back to Paterson, New Jersey where he was arrested for his escape from Jamesburg. Following his release he committed further crimes, such as purse-snatching and assault, so he was re-arrested and put in another high-security prison. When he was released from prison again, he took up boxing for a second time in 1961. But just five years later, he was wrongly convicted of a crime.

On the seventeenth of June 1966, four shots rang out in the Lafayette Bar & Grill in Paterson, New Jersey at approximately 2:30 AM. The gunman or gunmen fired into the bar and then fled the scene. At the time, Rubin Carter was still in Paterson, but miles away from the scene at a friend's house. He was subsequently stopped by the police whilst driving past the venue with friends and 12 days later on June the twenty-ninth, Rubin Carter and his friend John Artis were arrested and accused of the murder of James Oliver and Fred Nauyoks. There was little evidence linking Rubin and John to the crime, but eyewitnesses' descriptions led authorities to focusing on them. They were both black, and at the time that was enough to be jailed for. Even though they had no concrete proof that the men had blood on their hands, the all-white jury agreed that they should be jailed. And so they were.

For nineteen years, four months and nine days they sat on a cold stone floor and waited for someone to come and release them. Then one day, that person came; forty-seven year old Judge H. Lee Sarokin. On the seventh of November 1985, he ruled that the prosecution's case was based on racial bias, police convincing eyewitnesses to give false statements and misconduct by the prosecutors. Rubin died on the twentieth of April 2014 from prostate cancer.

Throughout their imprisonment, protests and rallies filled the streets calling for justice and their freedom. Before their release, Bob Dylan wrote a song called 'Hurricane’, which brought deliberate international attention to the case of Carter and Artis. Hearing this song forty years later led me to discover the story of the imprisonment of an innocent man who was wrongly charged for murder based on the colour of his skin.