African American Film Studies Term Paper - Age of Oprah

Wade Verch

BCA 300

Term Paper

3/26/2012

The Oprah Winfrey Dynasty

If you were living 50 years ago, and could invest not in an American company, but in an American person, who would it be? If Bill gates came to mind, he is the head of a corporation, I’m looking for just a person. What household name could be worth more today than any other self-made name in the world? The answer to this of course, would be Oprah Winfrey. In March 2012 Oprah’s Net worth was a reported $2.7 Billion (forbes.com), and is considered the 14th most powerful woman in the world (keep in mind this list includes royalty). But the purpose of this paper is not to simply glorify all of Oprah’s achievements, rather to highlight what Oprah has done for the black media community,

Oprah Winfrey was born in Kosciusko Mississippi on January 29, 1954; the very same year that the U.S. Supreme court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision finally put an end to racial segregation in public schools. She was born to unmarried parents and raised by her grandmother on a farm.

Fast forward a few years, eight years after Sidney Poitier becomes the first African-American man to win a Best Actor Academy award for his outstanding performance in Lilies of the Field, Oprah is hired by a Nashville radio station to ready the news while she was still in high school. She began making a name for herself when she became not only the first female African-American anchor, but the overall youngest anchor in history at the age of only 19, reporting for Nashville’s WTVF-TV. She later transferred to Baltimore to anchor before beginning her talk show hosting career.

Oprah’s initial talk show career began in 1978, when she was hired as co-host to Baltimore’s WIZ-TV’s People Are Talking. This position was fairly short lived as she relocated to Chicago to host the morning show A.M. Chicago in December, 1984, the same year The Cosby Show began airing. In only a month, Oprah grew A.M. Chicago to the “number...