Tommy Davidson on Finding His Identity, Race & Comedy

Tommy Davidson was found in a trash heap in Greenville, Mississippi, unconscious and starved, wearing a t-shirt that read "I'll be the president in 2000." He was eighteen months old. A white woman named Barbara Davidson, who had come to Mississippi to help with voting drives and immunization efforts, discovered him under a tire on top of the garbage. She took him to the hospital, where he stayed for sixty days, and then she adopted him. That origin—being rescued by a white family and raised in a world where he didn't know he was Black until age five—became the foundation of everything Davidson would later process through comedy.

The Education of Race

Davidson grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, on a farm, surrounded by animal litters. He thought his family worked the same way: "The mom could be a black cat and have three white ones, a gray one and an orange one. So I thought that's how we were." When his parents divorced and moved the family to Washington, D.C. in 1968, that understanding shattered. The neighborhood was burning, tear gas filled the streets, and Black kids beat him daily, calling him "white cracker lover." White kids called his white siblings "cracker." He was caught in the middle, belonging fully to neither group.