Wednesday, February 02, 2005

Tasha Highlights Oprah Winfrey for Black History Month

Tasha: Oprah Winfrey is an African-American I want to highlight for Black History Month.
- born and in Mississipi
- raised by her grandmother on a farm
- ran away at 13 after being molested
- at 17 she started working at a radio station
- at 19 she started working at a tv station
- in 1978 she co-hosted her first TV talk show
- in 1984 she moved to Chicago and started hosting "AM Chicago"
- a year later, the show was expanded from a half hour to a full hour and the program was named after her
- she has won Emmys for her talk show
- she has been Oscar nominated for The Color Purple, my favorite movie and my second favorite is Beloved which she not only acted in but also produced
- she runs Harpo and is in charge of her career
- she is committed to up lifting all of us regardless of race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation
- she is committed to reading and her book program has done so much to motivate adults to
continue reading or return to reading
- she is the first African-American woman to become a billionaire and the first to own a TV studio
- like tina turner she has overcome abuse and shown us all how to survive
- two of the finest TV films not on HBO were The Wedding and Before Women Had Wings
- Oprah's Angel Network assists so many
- she is a successful business woman, she is someone who gives back to all communities and she lifts us all with her book club, with her charity, with her TV show, with her magazine, and by the example she provides daily.

My favorite quote from Oprah is this, "For me, education is about the most important thing because that is what liberated me. Education is what liberated me. The ability to read saved my life. I would have been an entirely different person had I not been taught to read when I was an early age. My entire life experience, my ability to believe in myself, and even in my darkest moments of sexual abuse and being physically abused and so forth, I knew there was another way. I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it."