Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on December 28, 1954. His mother, Lennis “Lynne” (Lowe), was a beauty parlor owner and operator born in Georgia and partly raised in Harlem, New York.[5][6][7][8] His father, Denzel Hayes Washington Sr., a native of Buckingham County, Virginia, was an ordained Pentecostal minister who was also an employee of the New York City Water Department, and worked at a local S. Klein department store.

Washington attended Pennington-Grimes Elementary School in Mount Vernon until 1968. When he was 14, his parents divorced and his mother sent him to the private preparatory school Oakland Military Academy in New Windsor, New York. Washington later said, “That decision changed my life, because I wouldn’t have survived in the direction I was going. 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.”[9] After Oakland, he attended Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Florida, from 1970 to 1971.