Biography of Oprah Winfrey
Biography of Oprah Winfrey
Oprah Winfrey has always been an achiever. As a child she was a victim of sexual abuse. As a teenager she became Miss Black Nashville. Now, as an adult she is the world’s black millionaire in a white, male-dominated world.
Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Her name was believed to be Orpah from the Book of Ruth; however, the midwife got mixed up and so she wound up being Oprah on her birth certificate. (Adler 1)
When Oprah was five years old she wished that she were white. She would sleep with a clothespin on her nose and two cotton balls seeking for it to turn up. She prayed for Shirley Temple curls every day. Oprah wanted to be white because white kids didn’t get whippings. She got beatings all the time from her grandmother. “Old people raised kids like this. My grandmother would whip me for days and not get tired. It would be called child abuse now.” When she turned six years old she went to Milwaukee to live with her mother, Verna Lee, who was on welfare and worked as a cleaning woman. A month later Oprah started school as a Kindergarten student. She wrote her teacher a letter that expressed her thoughts. Oprah thought that she did not belong in this grade and asked the teacher to help her. Her teacher decided that Oprah was right and moved her up a grade. She was now in first grade. One day she was going to get beat up by six white kids. To get out of this mess she told them what happened to the people who tried to stone Jesus of Nazareth. Afterwards, she was called the preacher and her peers did their best to try and stay away from her. As a result of a test that was given to her at the near the end of first grade she was being elevated to the third grade as soon as the semester began in September. However she went to live with her father and her stepmother as soon as she concluded the first grade. Her stepmother realized that Oprah was going to begin in third grade but she didn’t know how to multiply or divide. So she spent the summer learning the multiplication table. (Adler 3-8, Mercy 6-8)
Oprah moved back...