50 Cent

September 1st, 2007

50 Cent

Curtis James Jackson III (born July 6, 1975), grew up in Queens, New York City. He was raised by his mother Sabrina Jackson, who was only fifteen when she had him. When Curtis was eight, his mother (who was a cocaine dealer) was murdered. Someone drugged her drink and left with the gas turned on with the windows shut. After her death, Jackson was taken in by his grandparents who shared their house with his eight aunts and uncles. He recalls, “My grandmother told me, ‘Your mother’s not coming home. She’s not gonna come back to pick you up. You’re gonna stay with us now.’ That’s when I started adjusting to the streets a little bit.” Jackson grew up with his younger cousin, Michael Francis, who earned the nickname “25 Cent” for being his younger counterpart. Francis raps under the stage name “Two Five”.

Jackson took up boxing around the age of eleven. During the mid 1980s, he competed in the Junior Olympics as an amateur boxer. He recounts, “I was competitive in the ring and hip-hop is competitive too… I think rappers condition themselves like boxers, so they all kind of feel like they’re the champ.” At the age of twelve, Jackson began dealing drugs during times when he said he was at after-school programs. He also took guns and drug money to school. In the tenth grade, he was caught by metal detectors at Andrew Jackson High School. He later stated, “I was embarrassed that I got arrested like that… After I got arrested I stopped hiding it. I was telling my grandmother, ‘I sell drugs.’”

On June 29, 1994, Jackson was arrested when he sold helped sell cocaine to an undercover cop. Three weeks later he was arrested again when police searched his home and found heroin, crack cocaine, and a gun. He was sentenced to three to nine years in prison, but managed to serve six months in a Shock Incarceration boot camp, where he earned his GED. Jackson said that he did not use cocaine himself, he only sold it. He adopted the nickname “50 Cent” as a metaphor for “change”. The name was derived from Kelvin Martin, a 1980s Brooklyn robber known as “50 Cent”. Curtis chose the name “because it says everything I want it to say. I’m the same kind of person 50 Cent was. I provide for myself by any means.”

Source: Wikipedia