During a recent interview with Shannon Sharpe on his Club Shay Shay program, actor Terry Crews discussed his wife Rebecca King-Crews’ racial identity and the attacks she has faced.
Sharpe, who starred in Everybody Hates Chris, revealed that his wife was reared in a predominately Black city in Indiana, while having a White father, according to Complex.
“She’s black, yes, Black momma white daddy and been raised like that, but again, just cause she don’t have that kind of look, her momma is Black,” Crews, 55, said. “She’s from Gary, Indiana, bruh. My wife was Miss Gary, Indiana 1984. And Gary, Indiana is like Flint. Ain’t nothing but Black people. And she was raised in Black culture, so it wasn’t like she was raised in the outskirts.”
Despite his wife’s racial identity being questioned, Crews said that issue never bothered her when Sharpe asked how he handles it. “This is what I admire about her,” Crews said. “It never bothered her; she was like, ‘I love Black people, and even if some feel that I’m white, I understand it.’… Wow, and it’s deep to me.”
“That’s the way I had to start thinking because I would always get angry,” he continued. “But to watch her, the way she dealt with things peacefully, like ‘I’m not gonna go there. You know what? That’s trauma that they had to deal with, and I understand it. But I love them anyway.’”
Crews met Rebecca during his second year at Western Michigan University. They married in 1989 and have four girls and one son. They’re also grandparents.
During the conversation, Crews discussed a violent struggle he had with his father after discovering he had attacked his mother.
“That was the darkest day,” the former NFL player recalled. “You got to understand the context of that situation is he had just hit my mother. I wasn’t there, but I got a phone call. ‘Oh, your daddy just hit your mama.’ Now, I’m a grown-ass man, post-NFL, I already played the league. Like, ‘Hey man, what? I’m 245. I ain’t five, you ain’t talking to a five-year-old boy.’”