In her memoir, Channing also revealed a previously unknown African-American ancestry. Before she left for college in 1937, her mother told a 16-year-old Channing that her father’s birth certificate was labeled as “colored” because his mother was an African-American woman. Channing told Larry King in a 2002 interview that she only had one thing to say when she found out the news: “I got the greatest genes in show business.” she was a black woman
