a pile of trash like he was just a load of garbage and left him for dead. His (adopted) mother just so happened to be walking by that trash pile at the right time and saw his tiny foot sticking out and quickly got him to the hospital.“My mom who raised me, something told her to look behind this tire that was in a pile of trash, and she saw my foot,” Tommy said. He had major contusions and fractures to his skull at that time, leaving the doctors to wonder if he would even survive.

And it turns out Tommy did more than just survive, he became a highly respected comedian that we know him as today, but that journey to success was not void of turmoil and pains for Tommy growing up during the civil rights era in a family that was completely Caucasian (with the exception of himself). His family love him dearly, but some folks in society during the civil rights era, didn’t love him so much, nor understand him.

Tommy said that he was officially adopted by his family when he was two years old. Shortly after that, the family moved to D.C. and this is what Tommy said about that:

“We moved to Washington, D.C., the week Martin Luther King Jr. got shot. So we move into one of the worst black cities. “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.”

The world’s perception of him being the odd colored kid in his family of White people confused him as a child.

“Here I was, a great, bright-eyed kid who had never heard the N-word, who had never heard ‘white cracker’ and was being called that by both [races],” he said. “I thought it was so stupid because, when I was a kid, I didn’t think that black people were black, I thought that we were brown like a crayon. And my sister was like peach, with the crayon.” But he also said that “The love that I got didn’t have any color.”

Because he experienced the type of love that was colorless as a kid, he revealed that he always had a deep question, that I think is very practical by the way, and that was “Why are the brown people always helping the peach people and the peach people have more?”

Check out Tommy’s interview below…

If there is one thing that seems to be consistent in the lives of many comedians such as Richard Pryor, Redd Foxx, Eddie Murphy, Kevin Hart, and others, is that they have often experienced some great pains in their childhoods, which allow probably them to create their own happiness from within that they then go out and inject the world with it by way of laughter- one of the most powerful natural “highs” around.
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