Oprah Born: Future Queen of American Media

Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, Mississippi, to an unmarried teenage mother. She spent her early childhood in poverty in rural Mississippi, was raised by her grandmother until age six, then shuttled between her mother in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville during an adolescence marked by abuse and hardship she later spoke about publicly, breaking a silence that helped reshape how Americans discussed sexual violence. She won a full scholarship to Tennessee State University after entering a local beauty pageant, and her broadcasting career began at age nineteen when she was hired as the youngest and first Black female news anchor at WLAC-TV in Nashville. She was fired from a subsequent anchor position at a Baltimore station for being "too emotionally invested in the stories." She was twenty-two. The station reassigned her to a failing local talk show as a consolation, and she turned it into the highest-rated program in Baltimore. WLS-TV in Chicago recruited her in 1984 to host its own struggling morning show, AM Chicago. Within a year, it was the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. Within four, The Oprah Winfrey Show was the highest-rated talk show in American television history, a position it held for twenty-five consecutive seasons. She built Harpo Productions into a media empire, launched the OWN network, became the first Black female billionaire in American history, and established a book club whose selections reliably became bestsellers overnight. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. She turned down the role of Sofia in The Color Purple, then was cast anyway at Steven Spielberg's insistence and received an Academy Award nomination for her first film performance.