The actress said she feels no resentment toward her birth mother, whom she met when she was 6

NEED TO KNOW

• Victoria Rowell said racial matching practices kept her in a Maine orphanage as an infant
• Two neighboring women brought her home before child welfare placed her with a family at age 3
• The actress said she holds no resentment toward her birth mother, whom she first met at age 6

Victoria Rowell is sharing more about living in foster care after being given up for adoption by her birth mother.

Rowell, 67, opened up about her childhood in a new interview with Carlos King, explaining that she was born in Maine when the state “disallowed mixed-race Brown children, period, to be adopted by White families.”

“And after I was born, right at the hospital, I was placed into an orphanage run by the nuns,” she shared. “And I stayed there because they were looking for, when I was a baby, a Negro family, and so there weren’t a lot of Black families in Maine at the time.”

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“Nonetheless, there were two women native to Maine who said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ They went up to the orphanage [and said], ‘Let us have the baby,’” she continued. “And so the nuns relented, and it was sort of like a handshake, and there I went with Mrs. Taylor and Mrs. Sawyer and later Mrs. Dunn. They were friends. They were neighbors. And it was the most amazing thing.”

While there was no state or statutory ban in Maine explicitly stating that mixed-race children or children of color could not be adopted by White families in the late 1950s, informal racial matching policies were standard practice across American adoption and foster care agencies at the time.

All these years later, Rowell said she is “still in touch with the families” who brought her in.

However, she noted that social services found a more permanent solution when she was 3 years old.

“Child welfare services stepped in and found a Black family,” she said.

Asked if she knew why her birth mother decided to give her up for adoption, Rowell said, “She had no choice.”

“She is White,” Rowell said, adding, “Her having Black children was not going to be embraced. And so that on top of other challenges…there was no way. So right from birth, I was placed into the orphanage.”

Still, Rowell said she harbored “no resentment” toward her birth mother, whom she met at age 6.

“It was very strange, odd, scary,” she said of that first meeting. “I did not see my face in her. She was this woman with a magnificent French twist and by the time she had me, I was her fifth child.”

Her birth mother, the actress added, “had had a rough go. She had had a really rough go.”

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Rowell played Drucilla Barber Winters on The Young and the Restless from 1990 to 2007, earning three Daytime Emmy Award nominations and multiple NAACP Image Awards during that time. She also played Dr. Amanda Bentley in the CBS medical crime drama Diagnosis: Murder, which aired from 1993 to 2001, and had roles in films such as Dumb and Dumber.

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