“Orpah” Gail Winfrey was born on Jan. 19, 1954 in Kosciusko, MS to unmarried parents Vernita Lee – a housemaid, and Vernon Winfrey – a coal miner. During a 1991 interview with the Academy of Achievement, Winfrey said that people could not pronounce her name “Orpah” correctly, so it was eventually changed to Oprah. Her grandmother Hattie Mae raised the future talk show host on a Mississippi farm with no indoor plumbing and, at times, barely anything to eat. What they lacked in basic necessities, however, was filled with spirituality. Winfrey was able to read the Bible and recite in church by the time she was three. Three years later, the young media queen moved to Milwaukee, WI with her mother. It was while living in this inner city ghetto that Winfrey was on the receiving end of horrifying experiences with molestation and rape from a cousin, an uncle and a family friend. It started when she was just nine and continued through most of her teen years. This abuse would inform her life – not only in her personal relationships and behavior, but in her later quest to channel her genuine empathy to help the have-nots, the abused and the forgotten.

Even though her home life was extraordinarily difficult and scarring, Winfrey excelled in school. She even received a scholarship to Nicolet High School in Glendale, WI at the age of 13. There was also a rebellious side to the teen Winfrey. She ran away from home and got pregnant a year after she was accepted to the school, but she lost the baby shortly after birth. Unable to control or provide for her daughter, Lee sent Winfrey to live with her father in Nashville, TN. Her studies became a priority and not long after, the girl who was raised on a farm and abused in the ghetto, won a full scholarship to attend Tennessee State University where she studied Communication. Winfrey even won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant at age 18 – one of the first of many honors awarded to her.

Winfrey always dreamed big, even as a young lady fresh out of college. She wanted to be a movie star, at a time when the idea of segregation was still fresh in the minds of many Americans. The adversity did everything but weaken Winfrey’s fighting spirit. Despite the odds stacked against her – being black and female in the South – at the age of 19, she became Nashville’s first female and first black TV news anchor for WTVF–TV. Life imitated art for Winfrey, as her idol at the time was Mary Tyler Moore of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (CBS, 1970-77), whose character also pursued a career