Oprah Winfrey (born Orpah Gail Winfrey on January 29, 1954) is an American media proprietor, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. Winfrey is best known for her self-titled, multi-award-winning “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which was the highest-rated program of its kind in history and was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She has been ranked the richest African-American of the 20th century, the greatest black philanthropist in American history, and was for a time the world’s only black billionaire. She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world.
Winfrey was born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage single mother and later raised in an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood, claiming to be raped at age nine and becoming pregnant at 14; her son died in infancy. Sent to live with her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19. Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime-talk-show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place, she launched her own production company, Harpo, and became internationally syndicated.
Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication, she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue, which a Yale study claims broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream. By the mid 1990s, she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Winfrey later joined with the Discovery Channel to start her own network, the aptly-titled OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).
To learn more about Winfrey’s life, career and philanthropy, click here.
Posts published in “Birthdays”
Bessie Coleman, born Jan. 26, 1892, was a renowned aviator who was the first African-American woman to become a pilot and to hold an international pilot’s license. When she turned 18, Coleman took her savings and enrolled in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University (now called Langston University). She completed one term before her money ran out, and returned home.
In 1915 she moved to Chicago and worked as a manicurist, listening to stories from pilots who had flown in World War I. Determined to become a pilot, she was encouraged by Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender to study aviation abroad. Coleman received financial backing from a banker and the Defender. She eventually traveled to Paris and became the first African-American woman to earn an international aviation license and also the first in the world to earn an aviation pilot’s license. She later traveled to the Netherlands and Germany to get additional training before returning to the United States, where she did stunt flying and was billed as “the world’s greatest woman flier.”
Coleman developed a reputation as a skilled and daring pilot, who would stop at nothing to complete a difficult stunt. She died in 1926 after an airplane malfunction caused her aircraft to crash at the age of 34.
article by Jonathan P. Hicks via bet.com
Coleman developed a reputation as a skilled and daring pilot, who would stop at nothing to complete a difficult stunt. She died in 1926 after an airplane malfunction caused her aircraft to crash at the age of 34.
article by Jonathan P. Hicks via bet.com
Born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, CA on January 25, 1938, Etta James was an American singer whose style spanned a variety of music genres including blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, soul, gospel and jazz. Starting her career in 1954, she gained fame with hits such as “Roll With Me, Henry“, “At Last“, “Tell Mama“, “Something’s Got a Hold on Me“, and “I’d Rather Go Blind” for which she wrote the lyrics. James is regarded as having bridged the gap between rhythm and blues and rock and roll, and is the winner of six Grammys and 17 Blues Music Awards. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, the Blues Hall of Fame in 2001, and the Grammy Hall of Fame in both 1999 and 2008. Rolling Stone ranked James number 22 on their list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time and number 62 on the list of the 100 Greatest Artists. To learn more about Etta James, click here, and watch her perform “Something’s Got A Hold On Me” below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ0ObhAYo4M
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
The State Museum in Albany, NY is marking the 100th birthday of photographer Gordon Parks with an exhibit of his works. The show opens on Jan. 26 and will showcase six decades of Parks’ photographs. It will include his most famous photo, “American Gothic, Washington, D.C.,” which shows a black cleaning woman standing in front of an American flag with a broom and a mop.
State Education Commissioner John King says Parks’ work helped drive the Civil Rights movement by exposing the stark realities of life faced by many African Americans.
The State Museum display is organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibit includes images from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collections at the Library of Congress.
article by Associated Press via huffingtonpost.com
State Education Commissioner John King says Parks’ work helped drive the Civil Rights movement by exposing the stark realities of life faced by many African Americans.
The State Museum display is organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The exhibit includes images from the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information collections at the Library of Congress.
article by Associated Press via huffingtonpost.com
(Photo: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution)
Willa Brown, born on Jan. 21, 1906, was one of the pioneer figures in the world of African-American aviators. She was the first Black female officer in the Civil Air Patrol and the first Black woman to hold a commercial pilot’s license in the United States.
Brown was the coordinator of war-training service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and later was a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board.
A native of Glasgow, Kentucky, Brown earned a degree from Indiana State Teachers College and a master’s degree from the Aeronautical University in Chicago. She later earned a master’s in business administration from Northwestern University. She and her husband, Cornelius Coffey, formed the Coffey School of Aeronautics to train African-American pilots. Brown retired in 1971 as a schoolteacher. She died of a stroke in 1992.
article by Jonathan P. Hicks via bet.com
Brown was the coordinator of war-training service for the Civil Aeronautics Authority and later was a member of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Women’s Advisory Board.
A native of Glasgow, Kentucky, Brown earned a degree from Indiana State Teachers College and a master’s degree from the Aeronautical University in Chicago. She later earned a master’s in business administration from Northwestern University. She and her husband, Cornelius Coffey, formed the Coffey School of Aeronautics to train African-American pilots. Brown retired in 1971 as a schoolteacher. She died of a stroke in 1992.
article by Jonathan P. Hicks via bet.com
The greatest boxer of all time — Muhammad Ali — turns 71 today. Besides being a sports legend, Ali is considered a civil rights and cultural icon. His boxing career spanned three decades and certainly had its share of ups and downs. Still, no fighter’s heights were as compelling as Ali’s. Check out The Grio’s list of the top 10 greatest bouts of his career in the slideshow by clicking below:
Muhammad Ali 71st birthday: The champ’s 10 greatest fights | theGrio.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oehry1JC9Rk&w=420&h=315]
Although Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday will not be nationally observed until January 21st this year, we want to honor King today as well, on his actual day of birth. Learn more about this monumental agent of change, his life and work on biography.com, and watch his famous last speech “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop” above.
article by Lori Lakin Hutcherson
Pioneering percussionist, composer, band leader, and drummer Max Roach was born Maxwell Lemuel “Max” Roach in North Carolina to parents Alphonse and Cressie, and worked with dozens of musical greats, including Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Writer, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (pictured) was one of the most-outstanding authors that emerged from the Harlem Renaissance. Over the course of four novels, an autobiography, and dozens of published writings, Hurston has been an inspiration for distinguished writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, and countless others.
Hurston was the fifth of eight children born to her parents, John and Lucy Ann, in the small town of Notasulga in Alabama. The family uprooted when she was just a toddler, making their new home in Eatonville, Fla. Her father, a preacher, would become mayor of the town, which was one of the first all-black incorporated cities in the United States. After the death of her school teacher mother in 1904, her father remarried and she was sent to boarding school in nearby Jacksonville. Hurston was later expelled after her father stopped paying the tuition.
(Photo: BILL FOLEY /Landov)
Gordon Parks was a master of many arts: photography, film making, music and fiction. But the world almost missed the opportunity to experience and enjoy his major contributions. Born on Nov. 30, 1912, to a family in Fort Scott, Kansas, that already included 14 other children, Parks was declared stillborn when his doctor couldn’t detect a heartbeat. Thanks to another doctor who thought to immerse him in cold water, which got his heart beating, he survived.
Parks, who taught himself photography with a used camera he bought for $7.50, led a life filled with firsts and major milestones, including shooting for Vogue and becoming the first Black photographer at Life magazine, where for two decades he documented the civil rights movement, race relations and urban life in America.