Oprah Theology

1 The Woman, Oprah Winfrey: the Early Years Surveying Oprah’s early years provides insight into what makes Oprah, Oprah. This chapter examines her early years, reunion with her mother, and her broadcasting roots. If ever there was a rags-to-riches story worth telling, the life of Oprah is one. One of the most respected and influential people in the world today, Oprah Winfrey came from impoverished obscurity in rural Mississippi. Her successful navigation through a maze of tragic circumstances to become the self-assured woman who graces the cover of every issue of O, The Oprah Magazine is remarkable and applaudable. Few people have risen above a childhood like hers, much less to become world-renowned. Oprah’s Early Years In 1954, the year Oprah was born, the US Supreme Court made its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, which was intended to end racial segregation in public schools. However, changing the law proved easier than changing people’s minds. Black Americans in 1954 had to navigate a racially charged, polarized, and hostile environment further exacerbated by the fact that many black Americans were still reeling disproportionately from the effects of the 1930s Great Depression. In 1954, a disproportionate number of African Americans lived in extreme poverty compared to their white American counterparts. Yet in retrospect, Oprah realized that the Brown v. Board of Education decision “created hope that life could be better for black folks everywhere.” Oprah was born in Kosciusko, a town in the heart of Mississippi, approximately seventy miles from the capital of Jackson. The town received its name from the Polish general Tadeusz Kosciuszko/Thaddeus Kosciusko, an ally of the United States during the American Revolution and a subsequent member of the Continental Congress. (Today, Kosciusko boasts the slogan, “Come for the history, stay for the charm.” ) During Oprah’s childhood, however, Kosciusko was anything but charming for black Americans. Racial violence was the norm in this part of the state during the fifties. In the 1950s, European Americans could molest African Americans with impunity in Mississippi. In Systematic Racism: A Theory of Oppression, author Joe R. Feagin highlights one of many Kosciusko incidents that illustrate how Mississippians in this period tended to turn a blind eye to the injustices perpetrated on black Americans. Feagin wrote, “Three white men, who had been held in jail for a time for raping the stepdaughter of a black man, proceed to his house where they shot and killed a woman and two children in retaliation for imprisonment.” This kind of intimidation was not the exception but the norm in those days. Fear coupled with extreme poverty and no hope for advancement resulted from generations of embedded prejudice that forced many African Americans to flee Kosciusko at first chance, not only in search of a better way of life in the north but also, in some instances, to literally save their lives.