Oprah Winfrey: A Biographical Essay

There is no doubt about two things: Oprah Winfrey is not only the most powerful African-American in the world (yes, Jesse Jackson, believe it!) but she is undoubtedly the most powerful woman in the world. But, it was not an easy road to her current success, as "the Undisputed Queen of Talk since the mid-1980s, (and)....the first black woman to host a nationally syndicated weekday talk show". (No author 1997 1)

Winfrey was born on January 29, 1`954 on a farm in Kosciusko, Mississippi, the product of a fleeting tryst, between her eighteen-year old mother, Vernita Lee, and a twenty-year old soldier, Vernon Winfrey. Her mother didn't stick around, and with her father in the service, until she was six years old, she lived with her maternal grandparents. Actually, she was named Orpah, after a character in the biblical book of Ruth, but since everyone seemed to pronounce her name as Oprah, it was as Oprah that she grew up.

She was a very gifted child, beginning to recite in the weekly Baptist service to which her grandparents took her. But, despite this seeming stable existence, her life was radically altered when, beginning when she was nine, she was sexually abused by a teen-age cousin. This formed a life-long effort to help abused children and form charitable organizations to collect money and lobby Congress for legislation to protect children from sexual abuse. It turned out that, when she talked for the first time about those early days on her show in 1991, she also confessed that other men had also sexually violated her. Perhaps because of the fact that no one in her family or her church came to her aid, she left formal religion, and hasn't looked back since, even though she claims to be "God-fearing". She credits her biological father and his wife Zelma, for "saving" her. In an interview with Chicago Magazine she said that "If it hadn't been for my father, I would have gone in another direction. I could have made a good criminal. I would have used these same instincts differently" (No author 2002 2).