Oprah Winfrey: from poverty to America's first black billionaire

Oprah Winfrey was four-and-a-half years old, maybe five, when she decided she wasn’t going to have the life expected of her. She was raised on a small Mississippi farm by her grandmother, whose highest hope for her granddaughter was that when she became someone’s domestic worker, she would be treated kindly by her employers. "I just hope you get some good white folks when you grow up, who would treat you right" Winfrey said her grandmother used to tell her.

Winfrey was born in 1954 in Mississippi, to a teenage mother, but raised by her grandmother. At six she was sent to live with her mother, who worked long hours as a cleaner. When she was nine, Winfrey was raped by a cousin, and over the next few years, she was sexually abused by other men. She went to live with her father in Nashville at 14, hiding the fact she was pregnant and gave birth to a son two months early. He died soon afterwards.

Living with her father and stepmother provided stability and high expectations – her father expected good grades at school. 

When she was 17, Winfrey won a beauty pageant sponsored by a local radio station. Someone at the station, perhaps noticing her smooth, warm voice, asked her to read a news report on tape and she did it so well, she was offered a part-time job.

She moved to Baltimore to work for WJZ-TV as a news reporter and co-presenter of the six o’clock news. It wasn’t a success. People resented the fact that Jerry Turner, (veteran presenter) had been given a co-presenter, and it was a young, African-American woman.

Winfrey was moved to a morning slot, but later she got paired for a talkshow with Richard Sher, "People Are Talking".

“It became a sensation,” says Sher. Winfrey was, he says, “terrific. The word I would use to describe her is: compassionate. One of the reasons she gave up news and went into talk was whenever she did a story of children killed in a fire, or children murdered and abused, she would cry and cry. She would try to remain objective but she wore her heart on her sleeve, and people really loved that about her. She could relate, and still does, to the person who doesn’t have a penny to their name and a person who has billions.”

Looking for her next move, she sent an audition tape to WLS-TV in Chicago. They gave her the AM Chicago morning talk show, which became so successful it became The Oprah Winfrey show and was syndicated nationally. 

Around the same time, she had been spotted by Steven Spielberg, who decided to cast her for a role in his adaptation of "The Color Purple". Later, she got nominated for an Oscar for her outstanding performance in the film, but she didn't win. By the time she ended her talk show in 2011, leaving to set up her own cable channel, she had become a billionaire, and one of the most powerful women in the world. She has been credited with everything from liberalising US culture to reinvigorating America’s publishing industry with her book club, to influencing Barack Obama’s victory at the Presidential election in 2008.