In January of 1954, Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Oprah's mother, a poor, unmarried housemaid, had a short-lived relationship with Oprah's father, and eventually left her newborn daughter in the care of her own mother, Hattie Mae Lee. After six years in the custody of her grandmother, a strict, impoverished woman who disciplined her granddaughter with a switch, she moved to Wisconsin to live with her mother. After the birth of her half-sister, Patricia, Oprah's mother sent her to live with her father, a barber in Nashville, in hopes of easing her financial burden.
By the time Oprah Winfrey was nine, the sexual abuse that would mar her childhood had begun. She has informed her viewers that she has been a victim of sexual abuse multiple times in her life, at the hands of family friends and relatives. At thirteen, Oprah ran away from home, and a year later, she gave birth to a son who died shortly afterward.
She enrolled in the local high school, and was so successful there that she was transferred to another school, the more affluent Nicolet High, where she was teased about living in poverty. Frustrated, a teenage Oprah began to misbehave and was shipped off to live with her father once more, who stressed the importance of education.
At eighteen, Oprah won the "Miss Black Tennessee" beauty pageant, a job that would later lead to a career at a local radio station. In 1976, she began an eight-year stint as the host of "People are Talking," a talk show in Baltimore. After moving to Chicago to work at a station there as a hostess of "AM Chicago," she began down the path that would lead to her own television show,
The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Eventually, Oprah's television career would win her a role in Stephen Spielburg's
The Color Purple, and a subsequent Academy Award Nomination. As her big screen career kicked off, her TV show blossomed into a national phenomenon. By the late '80s, Oprah's self-help-centered show was raking in $125 million a year. In 1998, she co-founded Oxygen media, and later came out with
O Magazine, a monthly publication for women. As Oprah's media empire continued to grow, she was named by Forbes' magazine as America's richest self-made woman, a billionaire in her own right. In 2007, the philanthropic Ms. Winfrey opened the South African Leadership Academy for Girls. When the school became the center of a sexual abuse scandal, Oprah wasted no time in re-structuring the staff screening process to ensure that the young pupils under her indirect tutelage would be not only well-educated, but safe from molestation.
Now, in May of 2011, Oprah Winfrey has started up her own television channel--OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network--and remains one of the most influential people in the world. Her book club has shot many a title to the top of the bestsellers' list, and her political influence has helped win votes for President Barack Obama. She is an inspiration: not only to newscasters and talkative, opinionated (or not) journalists, but to people the world over who have ever had a dream.
