Winfrey, Oprah

By: Kathleen Thompson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Winfrey, Oprah

Sex:  Female

Born:  Kosciusko, Mississippi, United States
29 January 1954

Activity/Profession:  Talk Show Host, Stage / Screen Actor, Entrepreneur, Magazine and Journal Editor / Publisher, Motion Picture Producer / Director, Radio / Television Producer / Director

(b. 29 January 1954),
talk-show host, actor, and producer.

It should surprise no one with a sense of history that, as soon as race and gender obstacles began to fall in society, an African American woman rose to a position of dizzying success and influence. All the characteristics and values that helped black women survive against the worst forms of oppression helped one black woman, Oprah Winfrey, to soar.

Oprah Winfrey was born to Vernita Lee and Vernon Winfrey in Kosciusko, Mississippi. When her parents, who were not married, separated, she went to live with her maternal grandmother on a farm. Although life was austere, the young girl thrived. She learned to read before she was three and was in the third grade by the age of six. At that point, she went to live with her mother in Milwaukee. Vernita Lee managed a subsistence-level existence with income from welfare and domestic work, and she had little time to supervise her daughter. Between the ages of nine and twelve, Winfrey was repeatedly subjected to sexual abuse by a cousin and then by other men close to her family. She began to have such serious behavioral problems that Lee gave up and sent the girl to her father in Nashville.

Life changed dramatically. A respected member of his community, Vernon Winfrey put his daughter under the strictest guidance. Soon, she was again excelling in school and in extracurricular activities such as speech and drama and the student council. While she was still in high school, a local radio station, WVOL, hired her to broadcast the news. She attended Tennessee State University on a scholarship she had won in an Elks Club oratorical contest.

Early Career

During her freshman year, Winfrey won the titles of Miss Black Nashville and Miss Black Tennessee and was a contestant in the Miss Black America pageant. This led to a job offer from the local CBS television affiliate, WTVF. In 1971, Winfrey became Nashville's first woman coanchor. She was still in the job when she graduated from college. Shortly thereafter, in 1976, she was offered a job at WJZ-TV, the ABC affiliate in Baltimore, Maryland.

Oprah Winfrey, talk-show host, actor, and producer. She has been not only an enormously successful entertainer but also a powerful force for change.

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The management at WTVF in Nashville had enjoyed great success with Winfrey by allowing her to be herself. The management at WJZ tried to remake the young broadcaster in a more standardized mold, and as a result her first year at the station was rocky. The situation improved greatly when she was switched to co-hosting the morning talk show, Baltimore Is Talking, with Richard Sher. Winfrey did the show for seven years, with ever-increasing popularity. Then, in 1984, she moved to Chicago to take over A.M. Chicago, a talk show with serious ratings trouble. It aired opposite Phil Donahue, a Chicago favorite, and none of its many hosts had been able to make a dent in his audience.

It took a month for Winfrey to equal Donahue's ratings. This was in a city notorious for its racial problems—not the ideal milieu for a black woman. It took three months for Winfrey to surpass Donahue in the ratings. A year and a half after Winfrey's arrival in the windy city, A.M. Chicago expanded to an hour and became The Oprah Winfrey Show.

In 1985, Winfrey was cast in the film version of Alice Walker's The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg. Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination. She continued her acting career in film and on television, forming a production company, Harpo Productions, to develop her own projects. In 1989, she bought her own television and movie production studio. That same year, she donated $1 million to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, one of many contributions to the community.

In 1989, Winfrey produced a miniseries based on Gloria Naylor's novel The Women of Brewster Place; its success led to the creation of a short-lived network dramatic series, Brewster Place (1990). Winfrey herself appeared in both the miniseries and the drama as the long-suffering Mattie Michael. Meanwhile, for her work on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Winfrey received three Emmy Awards, two (in 1987 and 1991) as outstanding host of a talk/service show and one (in 1991) as supervising producer of the outstanding talk/service show (the show itself received Emmys in 1987 and 1988).

A Social Phenomenon

At this point, Oprah Winfrey was an enormously successful entertainer, but her power as a force for change had barely been acknowledged. Within the next few years, all that would change. The most startling manifestation would come in the form of Oprah's Book Club. In 1996, Winfrey announced that she would be choosing books for reading and discussion with her audience. The first selection was Jacquelyn Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean, which had been published with a substantial but unremarkable print run of 68,000 copies. By the time the discussion of the book took place on the air, there were 750,000 copies in print. After the show, another 100,000 copies had to be rushed into print. The next selection Winfrey announced, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, had been published nearly nineteen years before. Within a week, it was at the top of Publishers Weekly's trade-paperback best-seller list and had sold 40,000 copies in hardcover. That was only the beginning. The phenomenon was repeated with every Oprah selection.

The publishing industry went into shock. The white male literary establishment was accustomed to giving or withholding validation, both critical and popular, in one form or another. Now it was clear that, with a wave of her charisma, an African American woman was able to make any book she chose a best seller. Gayle Feldman, in the New York Times Book Review, called Winfrey “the most powerful book marketer in the United States.”

Significantly, Winfrey was not just selling books. She was selling books by a diverse group of writers, the majority of whom were women. Far too canny to cast her book club in a didactically political light, she nonetheless chose nine books by black women, twenty-four by white women, and one each by a Middle Eastern woman and a Hispanic woman. The other thirteen were by men, black and white. Far more important, she cast herself in the traditionally male role of literary arbiter and challenged the assumption that there was some ordained group that could decide, and tell others, what a good book was. This would not have been so disturbing to the establishment if she had been selling “popular fiction,” but most of her choices had a claim to being taken more seriously than that, and she asked her audience to do so.

The honeymoon for publishers, authors, and booksellers was ended, not surprisingly, by a white male author, Jonathan Franzen, who whined in public about the blot on his reputation as a serious writer incurred by his selection as an Oprah author. Winfrey retracted her invitation for Franzen to appear on her show, explaining that he seemed to be uncomfortable about it, which was not her intention. Shortly thereafter, Oprah's Book Club was discontinued. When she again began recommending books, they were “classics”—by authors who were deceased.

In the meantime, Winfrey's power was acknowledged by a lawsuit that threatened to limit seriously her freedom to express her opinions publicly. The incident began when Howard Lyman, a director of the Humane Society of the United States, said on Winfrey's show that U.S. cattle were being fed beef protein and that, therefore, the country was at risk for an epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad cow disease). To make his point, he said that such an epidemic could make “AIDS look like the common cold.” Understandably, Winfrey said that he had “just stopped me cold from eating another burger.”

Beef sales plummeted, and Paul Engler, a Texas rancher and president of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association, decided to sue both Winfrey and Lyman for damages. During the course of the trial, considerable attention was paid to the power even a casual comment by Winfrey could have. She won the case and the right to continue to speak publicly with the same impunity guaranteed to others. However, Oprah's Book Club and the beef suit were such overt revelations of Winfrey's influence that social commentators began to pay more attention to the other ways in which she wielded clout. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly named Oprah Winfrey the most powerful person in Hollywood, succeeding Steven Spielberg, who had held the honor the previous year. As the century turned, Time put her in the running for “most influential figures of the twentieth century.” In 2001, the University of Illinois offered a course called History 298: Oprah, the Tycoon. In 2002, Christianity Today called her “one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America.”

Theories of Her Success

There have been uncounted theories about why Winfrey was so successful and took such a hold on her audience. Most are underlaid with a “despite-being-a-black-woman” assumption, articulated or not. One could argue that being a black woman, specifically a black feminist, was central to her appeal. Patricia Hill Collins laid out what she believed to be the characteristics of a black feminist. They are a virtual description of Oprah Winfrey and the approach that made her so popular with such a large audience. These characteristics include a refusal to validate social relations that are based on dominance, preferring instead to remain accessible to women in as many economic and social classes as possible; a refusal to alter her language to accommodate traditional discourse; a willingness to incorporate the everyday in virtually all areas of discussion; a determination to challenge accepted ideas of intellect and of knowledge production. She puts the experience of being a black woman squarely in the center of her discourse. In addition, she consistently emphasizes the values that have guided African American women through centuries of oppression—community, family, spirituality, education, and inner strength.

Black feminism, or womanism, breaks through the class-bound ideologies of much of the white feminist movement in a way that makes it attractive to women from all walks of life. Black women's traditional values have great power for surviving in a confusing, threatening world. Oprah Winfrey was one of a number of black women—such as the Essence magazine editorial director Susan L. Taylor and the lawyer-talk-show panelist Star Jones—who gained a large following by representing these values in their work and in their lives.

As success built upon success, Oprah Winfrey branched out. Harpo Productions brought in about $300 million each year from the production of the television show alone. Her magazine O was the most successful start-up in the history of magazine publishing and brought in about $150 million, with a paid circulation of 2.5 million readers in 2002. In addition, Winfrey produced movies, had a highly lucrative lecture business, and owned a large part of Oxygen Media, a cable television company. In 2003, she became the first woman to join the ranks of self-made billionaires.

In the use of her money, Winfrey again followed the traditional values of black women. It is estimated that she gave some 10 percent of her income to charitable and philanthropic ventures, mostly anonymously. But there was nothing anonymous about her support of her Angel Network, through which she encouraged others to donate funds for scholarships, Habitat for Humanity, and other worthy causes. In its first year, 1997, the network raised $3.5 million. Winfrey also sponsored Use Your Life Awards to people engaged in the work of social change. At Dorothy Height's ninetieth birthday party, the boxing promoter Don King suggested that the guests show their respect and admiration for the longtime president of the National Council of Negro Women by pledging to pay off the $5 million mortgage on the organization's headquarters. Winfrey promptly primed the pump with a $2.5 million donation. In 2003, she donated $2.5 million to fund the Oprah Winfrey Scholars Program for African Women at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, as well as $5 million to historically black Morehouse College.

Through all of this, one thing became clear: Oprah Winfrey was far more than a successful entertainer with a good heart. She was a woman with a mission and a vision. She believed that the world could be changed through changes in the lives of individuals, and she propounded that message in everything she did. Watching how she carries out this mission in the next few decades may tell a great deal about American society.

See also Entrepreneurs and Television Industry.

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