Tracy Morgan

Tracy Jamal Morgan (born November 10, 1968) is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He was a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy television series Saturday Night Live from 1996 to 2003 and played Tracy Jordan on the NBC sitcom 30 Rock from 2006 to 2013, both of which earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He also starred as Tray Barker on the TBS comedy The Last O.G.

Early life

Morgan was born on November 10, 1968, in Brooklyn and raised in Brooklyn's Marlboro Houses and Tompkins Houses in its Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood. He is the second of five children of a homemaker, Alicia (née Warden), and James Morgan Jr IV, a musician who left the family when Morgan was six years old.

His father named him Tracy in honor of a platoon mate and friend who shipped off to Vietnam with him and was killed in action days later.

The target of bullies as a child, Morgan attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1985, during his senior year, he learned that his father had contracted HIV from hypodermic needle use. His father died in January 1987, aged 38.

Morgan married his girlfriend Sabina that year and dropped out of high school just four credits short of his diploma to care for his ailing father. Living on welfare, Morgan sold crack cocaine with limited success, but began earning money performing comedy on the streets after his best friend was murdered. He said in 2009: "He would say to me, 'Yo, Tracy, man, you should be doing comedy.' A week later, he was murdered. And that for me, that was like my Vietnam. I had my survival guilt when I started to achieve success. Why I made it out and some guys didn't."

Morgan embarked on a stand-up comedy career, successfully enough that he "finally moved to a nice community in [The Bronx neighborhood of] Riverdale, from a run-down apartment next to Yankee Stadium in the Bronx."