For nearly three decades, comedian Tommy Davidson has been cracking up audiences with his stand-up routine, quirky one-of-a-kind characters and spot-on impressions of celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Michael Jackson. In 1990, Davidson shot to fame when he was cast on the hit sketch comedy show “In Living Color.”
After that, Tommy was seen in movies, doing voice overs for cartoons and headlining in comedy specials all over the country. But it’s hard to imagine that someone who’s star is so bright, started life with such a dark time.
On 2015’s “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”, Davidson opens up about his childhood and how he was literally thrown away by his birth mother. Tommy’s birth mother literally threw him behind a garbage can and left him there. His adoptive mother said that she had a feeling to look behind the public trash can in the alley saw Tommy’s leg. From there she took him to the hospital where they didn’t know if he would even live or die.
“I was damaged pretty bad. I had contusions in my skull, was scarred. The doctors didn’t even know if I was going to live,” said Davidson.
Although he was adopted, the majority of African American children are left behind. Moreover, a baby who is not African-American is seven times more desirable to potential adoptive parents than a black baby. Surprisingly Latino and white children fared about the same.
All of this translates into dollars in America’s $2-3 billion adoption market: In a recent study, parents were willing to pay $16,000 more for a girl than a boy, but $38,000 more for a non-African-American baby than a black one.
Following his adoption by a white family in 1966, Davidson moved from Colorado to Wyoming to Oregon until he was about 5 years old. After bouncing from state to state, his family made the move to the East Coast to…
… Washington, DC at one of the most racially violatile times in American history–two days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed.
“We moved to Washington, D.C., the week Martin Luther King [Jr.] got shot. So we move into one of the worst black cities,” he told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill. “There’s a riot, tear gas, tanks and federal troops are there. Me, my sister and my brother were laying on the floor in the car wondering what the hell was going on.”
Although Davidson was surrounded by a volatile environment, he didn’t feel any resentment because of the love that he felt at home and with the family, his family, that took him in.
“The love that I got didn’t have any color,” he said.
Here is Tommy showing the love to his fans during one of his classic stand up routines.
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