DMC Did Not Know He Was Adopted Until Age 35

Darryl "DMC" McDaniels helped invent hip-hop as one third of Run-DMC. For most of his life, he thought he knew his own origin story. Then, at 35, he found out he did not.

A Secret His Mother Kept

McDaniels learned the truth while working on his autobiography. His mother, Bannah, finally told him he was adopted.

He had been placed with the New York Foundling as an infant and spent his first months in foster care before the McDaniels family took him home. He grew up in Hollis, Queens, never knowing any of it.

The discovery sent him searching for his birth mother, a journey later chronicled in the Emmy-winning VH1 documentary DMC: My Adoption Journey, which aired in February 2006.

Turning the Discovery Into a Camp

That same year, McDaniels co-founded The Felix Organization with Sheila Jaffe, an Emmy-winning casting director who is also an adoptee.

Their first project was Camp Felix, a sleepaway summer camp in Putnam Valley, New York, built specifically for kids in the foster care system. It opened for its first campers that August, in partnership with the New York Foundling, the same agency that had once cared for McDaniels himself.

McDaniels has described his approach with a line borrowed from comic books: with great power comes great responsibility. He sees his platform in hip-hop as a way to open doors for kids the system might otherwise overlook.

Twenty Years of Campfires

Camp Felix has since grown into eight separate camp programs, including sessions built for LGBTQ+ youth and teen girls, plus year-round mentoring.

More than 10,000 children have now gone through the program, according to the organization.

In 2026, The Felix Organization marked its 20th year of running Camp Felix. That same year, McDaniels joined a national billboard campaign with Idina Menzel, Clear Channel Outdoor and the National Summer Learning Association, spotlighting how much a single summer camp experience can change a kid's life.

"Every child deserves the chance to discover who they are, build confidence, and dream bigger than their circumstances," McDaniels said.

Two decades later, the camp he built is still sending kids out on the lake, still lighting campfires, still giving foster kids the kind of summer he almost never had himself.