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Oprah Winfrey, the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award-winning talk show host and media mogul, has built a billion-dollar empire, which ultimately landed her at the No. 1 spot on Forbes' 2017 list of America's richest female entertainers. A celebrity who seems to have it all — including oodles of cash at her disposal; a stable, long-term relationship with her partner, Stedman Graham; and a best friend, Gayle King, who never leaves her side — surely had an idyllic childhood as well, right?
Sadly, that's not the case. However, Winfrey was born with the gift of gab, and she always dishes out a dose of genuine compassion to everyone she comes in contact with. In her 2019 book, The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose, Winfrey has advice for everyone who faces tragedies and challenges in life. 'This is the lesson I hope you take away,' Winfrey wrote (per CNBC). 'Your life is not static. Every decision, every setback, or triumph is an opportunity to identify the seeds of truth that make you the wondrous human being that you are.'
Inspiring words from an inspiring woman. But behind her gentle smile and kind heart lies a harrowing tale. This is Oprah Winfrey's tragic life story.
Oprah Winfrey's wayward home life
Oprah Winfrey's early years were chock-full of instability. It all began in rural Mississippi, where Winfrey lived with her maternal grandmother, Hattie Mae Lee. She was then shipped off to Wisconsin to live with her mom, Vernita Lee, when she was 6 years old. This move turned out to be the most dramatic of them all. 'I suddenly land in a place that's completely foreign to me. I don't know anybody. I don't really even know my mother,' Winfrey told HuffPostin 2015. 'I walked into that space feeling completely alone and abandoned.'
Before the future media mogul could get settled in Wisconsin, she was sent to live with her dad — or, rather, a man she presumed to be her dad — a coal miner named Vernon Lee, in Tennessee, before eventually returning to live with her mom once again. The constant changes in her surroundings definitely took a toll on her, but Winfrey told the publication that it was her faith that helped her push through.
'I grew up with an understanding that there was this God — all-knowing, all-powerful — who loved me,' Winfrey said. 'The wonder of that, the magical mystery of that, is what carried me when I was separated from my grandmother and sent to live with my mother at 6 years old.'
Oprah Winfrey's life on a pig farm
Born to teenage parents who conceived her after a one-time fling, Oprah Winfrey's early years were spent on her grandmother's aforementioned rural Mississippi pig farm, according to the New York Post, and life was less than ideal.
She and her grandmother didn't have much money, so their home was lacking common amenities. Running water and electricity were scarce. However, Winfrey reportedly enjoyed the wide open spaces that were available, as it was in direct contrast to the tiny apartment she shared with her mother and two half-siblings, Patricia and Jeffrey.
As with most incidents in her early life, abuse sadly crept its way back into the forefront. This time, it was physical. 'I went to a well to get some water and carry it in a bucket. And I was playing in the water with my fingers, and my grandmother had seen me out the window and she didn't like it,' Winfrey once told David Letterman in 2018 (via News.com.au). 'She whipped me so badly that I had welts on my back and the welts would bleed. And then when I put on my Sunday dress, I was bleeding from the welts. And then she was very upset with me because I got blood on the dress ... So then I got another whipping for getting blood on the dress.'
Oprah Winfrey's heartbreaking childhood nickname
These days, Oprah Winfrey has an entire team of stylists who get her all dolled up in gorgeous, red carpet-ready gowns, and her work closet at Harpo Studios in Chicago is filled to the brim with designers duds. But this self-made multi-billionaire didn't always have a collection of pricey, luxury goods to choose from. Growing up in extreme poverty, Winfrey had no choice but to wear hessian overalls made out of potato sacks. Her untraditional, makeshift outfits caused her to be crowned with the heartless nickname of 'Sack Girl,' according to The Guardian.
When describing her childhood on the farm, Winfrey told David Letterman (via News.com.au), 'I grew up in an environment where children were seen and not heard.' This household ethos caused her to retreat and look for engagement in other places. The Guardian reported that, instead of having the typical farm animals as her pets, Winfrey had pet cockroaches instead. And since her family couldn't afford a box filled with toys for her, she made her own babydoll from a dried corncob.
Oprah Winfrey faced colorism at an early age
During the time she lived with her mom, Oprah Winfrey experienced intense colorism — a term used to describe intra-group prejudice that favors lighter skin.
Recalling the time she arrived at the home where her mother was renting a room, Winfrey told HuffPost, 'I remember the first night entering into that house and being told that I wouldn't be able to sleep with my mother and I wouldn't be able to sleep inside the house.' She said, 'There was a little foyer/porch before you actually got inside the house. I was put outside to sleep there.'
Winfrey was confused at first, but she later realized exactly what was going on. 'My mother was boarding with this very light-skinned black woman who could have passed for white ... I could tell instantly when I walked in the room that she didn't like me. It was because of the color of my skin,' the talk show queen explained. Instead of putting up a fight, the young Winfrey obliged and found solace within her sleeping arrangements, looking toward her faith for comfort. 'I remember praying on my knees the very first night I had been removed from my grandmother,' she said. 'I don't remember ever shedding a tear about it because I knew that God was my father, Jesus was my brother, and they were with me.'
She experienced sexual assault at the hands of close relatives
Oprah Winfrey's usually in the driver's seat when it comes to grilling her guests and getting to the bottom of important issues on The Oprah Winfrey Show and her later endeavors. However, the tables were turned when the talk show maven sat down for an interview with David Letterman and his Distinguished Professional Lecture and Workshop Series (via the Daily Mail). It was at this time that she opened up about her traumatic childhood, including the brutal rape she survived when she was just 9 years old.
Winfrey peeled back the layers of that experience even further in an issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. 'I was living in Milwaukee that summer, staying at an uncle's home, when a 19-year-old cousin raped me. As I trembled and cried, he took me for ice cream and convinced me not to tell — and for 12 years, I didn't,' she wrote. It wasn't the last time she would be violated as a child. Winfrey had told Letterman that she was also molested by various relatives when she was between the ages of 10 and 14.
Oprah Winfrey blamed herself
After being sexually abused numerous times during her formative years, Oprah Winfrey's self-esteem and self-worth were beyond crushed. The Oprah Winfrey Network CEO later wrote an emotional piece for her publication, O, The Oprah Magazine, and explained, 'It was a very long time before I understood how completely my life had been changed — how in one instant, I was no longer a child.' She continued, 'When you are sexually violated, it's not the physical act that destroys you. It's the weight of the secret you feel you have to keep, the person you have to become so no one will discover what you're hiding.'
The traumatic experiences caused Winfrey to confuse 'mistreatment with love.' And it took her many years to come to grips with the entire ordeal, as she went on to add that she held the belief that she 'had done something to cause the abuse' up until her 30s.
An attempt to terminate her pregnancy
While chatting with CNN's Piers Morgan in January 2011, Oprah Winfrey revealed that, after getting pregnant at 14 years old, she tried to drink laundry detergent in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy (via New York Daily News). At the time, the future actress and talk show host tried to make sense of the turn her life had taken at an early age.
'Getting pregnant was a result of bad choices, not having boundaries, sexual abuse from the time I was 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13,' Winfrey said, before explaining that she began doing 'crazy stuff that you do when you're trying to get attention, when you're really just trying to cry for help.'
Tragically, Winfrey would later lose her child shortly after giving birth (more on this below). A loss, of course, is often accompanied by some form of grief, but looking back on the way everything played out, Winfrey was able to find the silver lining. She later told Good Housekeeping UK, 'I didn't want babies. I wouldn't have been a good [mom] for babies. I don't have the patience.' She then quipped, 'I have the patience for puppies, but that's a quick stage!'
Oprah Winfrey hit rock bottom
In 2017, Oprah Winfrey told The Hollywood Reporter that, after she got pregnant at 14, she 'hit rock-bottom.' But things were far worse than anyone could've imagined.
We've previously mentioned Winfrey's attempt to terminate her pregnancy by drinking laundry detergent, but that was only one part of her plan. 'I became pregnant and hid the pregnancy. I'd intended to kill myself actually,' she said in a heartbreaking statement. 'I thought there's no way other than killing myself. I was just planning on how to do it. If I'd had the Internet, I might not be alive because now you can just Google how to do it.'
Winfrey went on to explain that the reason for wanting to harm herself came after she was sent to live with her father in Nashville. At the time, he had no idea she was pregnant when she moved in, and he reportedly made the following heartless comment (via the New York Daily News): 'I would rather see a daughter of mine floating down the Cumberland River than to bring shame on this family and the indecency of an illegitimate child.'
If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text HOME to the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
Oprah Winfrey got a 'second chance'
According to People magazine, Oprah Winfrey welcomed a son when she was 14 years old. But sadly, he was born prematurely and died in the hospital shortly afterwards. Additionally, when the teen worked up the courage to tell her family about the possibility of her favorite uncle being the father of her child, they brushed off her allegations. 'Because I had been involved in sexual promiscuity,' Winfrey told the media outlet, 'they thought if anything happened, it had to be my fault.'
Looking back on her early pregnancy, Winfrey told the New York Daily News that she had 'no connection' to the baby whatsoever. So, in her eyes, losing the child was a blessing in disguise. 'When the baby died, I knew that it was my second chance,' she said about getting a new lease on life. Despite feeling detached, an Australian news reporter encouraged her to give her deceased son a name, and Winfrey obliged by telling a crowd at an event, 'So I have named him, I had a little boy named Canaan ... And I named him Canaan because Canaan means new land, new life.'
Oprah Winfrey experimented with drugs
Oprah Winfrey is an open book when it comes to sharing tidbits of personal information about her life, but the startling admission that she experimented with drugs was something she never intended to talk about. The media mogul had been filming a program about drug addicts who were in recovery back in January 1995 (via The Washington Post). After one woman shared her story of smoking crack cocaine, Winfrey reportedly said she also went through a period of drug use with an ex-boyfriend.
She later decided to dive a little bit deeper into the topic in an interview with the Today show. However, she admitted, 'I had used drugs in my 20s with this boyfriend and I was more addicted to the boyfriend than I was to the drugs.' When former Today show host Billy Bush asked if her drug of choice was crack, Winfrey answered, 'Yeah, well it wasn't called crack at the time. It was called freebasing. It was before crack was crack.'
Her Story Cracked
Oprah Winfrey experienced public family betrayal
As she soared to fame and became known as one of the most prominent television figures, some of Oprah Winfrey's less-than-loyal kin attempted to cash in on her celebrity clout. One family member in particular, a now-deceased half-sister, was the one who spilled the news about Winfrey's teenage pregnancy in exchange for a $19,000 payout, the New York Post reported.
And, years later, it was Winfrey's own dad who attempted to make an easy buck by penning a tell-all book about his daughter. Once the talk show host found out about his plans, she told the New York Daily News in 2007 that she was 'shocked' and 'disappointed,' especially since she had just seen him a few months prior and he didn't even let on that he had a book in the works. 'The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey,' she told the publication.
With family members like these, who needs enemies?
Oprah Winfrey on the loss of her mother
On Thanksgiving Day of 2018, Oprah Winfrey lost her mother, Vernita Lee. She was 83. TMZ was the first outlet to report the sad news, which a spokesperson for Winfrey later confirmed (via HuffPost): 'The family of Vernita Lee are saddened to share of her passing ... at her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.'
Despite Winfrey's rocky relationship with her mother early in her life, the two eventually reconciled. Less than a month after Lee's death, Winfrey opened up to People about spending time with her mother during her last days in hospice care. 'I sat with my mother. I said, 'I don't know if you're going to make it. Do you think you're going to make it?' She said, 'I don't think I am,' Winfrey explained. 'I had a conversation with her about what that felt like, what it felt like to be near the end. I started telling all the people who cared about her that, 'She knows it's the end, so, if you want to say goodbye, you should come and say goodbye.'
After everyone traveled to say their 'sacred and beautiful' goodbyes, Winfrey did the same. 'I stood in the doorway and I said, 'goodbye,' she told the outlet. 'I knew it was going to be the last time we said goodbye.' Winfrey added that one of the last things she told her mother before she passed was, 'Thank you. Thank you, because I know it's been hard for you.'
Nobody drops a game-changer like the Carter family. Beyoncé unveiled an entire visual album at the stroke of midnight, got us into Formation on the eve of the Super Bowl and redefined lemonade for a generation. This morning it was Jay Z. Hova strolled onto the homepage of TheNew York Times with a four-minute narration of illustrated video exploring the racialized ravages of America’s drug war and was like, “I’ma just leave this here.”
The fire collaboration is the latest from the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the most respected change agents in the multidecade struggle for sentencing reform and sane drug policy. Progressive journalist, writer, and studio artist Molly Crabapple is the swift arm bringing life to the pen and ink representations of three decades of poor drug policy, mandatory sentencing, and explosive incarceration rates. Jay’s distinctive voice traces the trajectory of American imprisonment from 1986 to 2016, moving deftly from President Ronald Reagan’s shredding of the social safety net to President Bill Clinton’s crime bill to the new economy of legal marijuana that now excludes African-Americans and Latinos. dream hampton’s production genius brings the piece together.
Much respect to the alliance, dream, Molly, and Jay for this effort. It is a necessary intervention in this electoral season when the media seems determined to ignore any substantive discussion of policies impacting the lives of the most vulnerable Americans. It is important, but it is only half the story.
If Jay has given us a “History” of the War on Drugs, allow me to offer a “Herstory” of the War on Drugs. Don’t get it twisted, this ain’t beef. I ain’t the real Roxanne. And this ain’t exactly Rap Genius either. My goal here isn’t to annotate the piece as it stands. Although a good syllabus could emerge from quality citations on this piece. Get on it, Professor Dyson! I offer these lines to expand our understanding of how black communities were distorted and destroyed by the politics, policies, and philosophies of America’s misguided drug war. We need a bigger frame to ensure sisters are in the picture. This is that intersectional expansion.
Let’s begin at the beginning, where Jay begins.
In 1986, when I was coming of age, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the war on drugs that was started by Richard Nixon in 1971. Drugs were bad. Fried your brain. Drug dealers were monsters. The sole reason neighborhoods and major cities were failing. No one wanted to talk about Reaganomics and the ending of social safety nets, the defunding of schools, and the loss of jobs across America. — Jay Z
President Richard Nixon’s drug war is the older sibling of hip-hop, born just two years before that Sedgwick Avenue house party that would ultimately birth its own most prescient cultural critic. Like hip-hop, public policy needs rhetorical strategy. Even as black Americans were pressing for full citizenship in the civil rights revolution, lawmakers were stepping into the cipher to test “cultural deviance” as a battle strategy for public opinion. Citing pathology, they could shift public attention away from structural inequities burdening poor black communities. Jay recalls being labeled a monster in his own neighborhood when he was just a young man.
He wasn’t alone; leaders from both political parties discovered that a sure route to public notoriety was to climb the ladder of black women’s bent and broken backs.
Take Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, written when it was legal to deny housing on the basis of race, legal to pay workers different wages on the basis of race, and routine to deny school admission to black students. Despite the overwhelming barriers facing black folk, Moynihan concluded, black women were the main problem in our own communities. “A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife,” and he added, “There is probably no single fact of Negro American life so little understood by whites.” Come on, everyone knows black women’s hair is the single fact of black American life least understood by whites. Can you feel posthumous side-eye sir?
Moynihan’s conclusions granted permission to generations of policymakers to imagine poor black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine insistence on control both emasculated their potential male partners and destroyed their children’s futures. Instead of engaging black women as creative citizens doing the best they could in tough circumstances, the report labeled them as unrelenting cheats unfairly demanding assistance from the system.
This made it easier for Reagan to turn black women into Cadillac-driving welfare queens in the 1980s. It was simple for the American public to believe sensational headlines and popular movies in the 1990s blaming black mothers as the cause of social and economic decline through the epidemic of “crack babies.” Listen. Halle Berry got caught out there with this madness. Nah, we didn’t forget Losing Isaiah. We are going to let it slide because we know you had to work, but we did not forget. The reality is these so-called crack babies were a myth. What seemed to be the living, squealing, suffering, embodied evidence of pathological black womanhood turns out to be a media creation. Twenty-five years later, there is no evidence that use of crack actually causes abnormal babies, even though the media insisted this link was true. The crack baby was and is a racial myth – a myth with very real consequences.
Hustle became the sole villain and drug addicts lacked moral fortitude. In the 1990s, incarceration rates in the U.S. blew up. Today we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. — Jay Z
Crack babies are a myth, but alcohol and tobacco have well-documented and extremely negative effects during pregnancy. Alcohol and tobacco have something else in common — good lobbyists representing in Washington and in state capitals across the country. Maybe that is why you can’t be arrested for arriving to give birth drunk, but in many states you can be arrested if you have illicit drugs in your system when you give birth. Arrested. Not offered drug counseling or prenatal care. Arrested. Many of those states have, in turn, seen a substantial decline in poor women seeking prenatal care. Perhaps since, no surprise, 70 percent of women charged with fetal abuse are women of color. I wonder why they are the ones being tested.
While we are dragging pregnant black women off to jail, no one is held accountable for the one factor that has been shown consistently to have lasting effects on the health and life outcomes of mothers and children — poverty. Nearly a quarter of American children live in poverty, black infants are far more likely to be born into poverty, more likely to die in their first year, and more likely to suffer the health effects of poverty for a lifetime. A 2015 report by Save the Children also ranked the United States last among developed nations for maternal health outcomes, largely because of the racial disparities for black women. And maybe I missed it, but has anyone been charged for poisoning the children of Flint, Michigan, with lead yet?
But as Jay says. No one wants to talk about that.
The war on drugs exploded the U.S. prison population, disproportionately locking away blacks and Latinos. — Jay Z
Once the public has been convinced that culture and choices, not structures or policies, are to blame for bad outcomes, solutions coalesce around individual punishments rather than systemic change. Let’s lock up the bad guys instead of changing the bad laws. The prison population exploded and the effects of that explosion were not gender-neutral. The war on drugs was especially pernicious for black women.
Even though the total number of men behind bars is larger than the total number of women, the rate of growth for women has been faster. According to data from the Sentencing Project, between 1980 and 2014, the number of incarcerated women increased by more than 700 percent. These are disproportionately black women. The Department of Justice reports the rate of incarceration is almost twice as high for black versus white women, 113 per 100,000 compared with 51 per 100,000. Given that nearly 60 percent of these women are mothers who were caring for minor children before their sentencing, the jailing of black women has a devastating effect on black children and communities. Research suggests maternal incarceration can have a particularly acute effect on children’s mental and emotional well-being.
Judges’ hands were tied by tough-on-crime laws and they were forced to hand out mandatory life sentences for simple possession and low-level drug sales. My home state of New York started this with Rockefeller laws. — Jay Z
Most women in federal prison are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses, often conspiracy charges. The public hears drug conspiracy and thinks of large-scale organizations operating across borders. Think instead of a woman living with an infant and her boyfriend. Given that the overwhelming majority of incarcerated women are survivors of domestic abuse, sexual violence, and childhood trauma, it is likely this woman is in a situation where she or her children may experience abuse. If her boyfriend sells drugs from the apartment and she is arrested and asked if she knows anything, she has two choices. She can confirm her knowledge of the drug sales or deny it. If she confirms, she can be evicted. She may suffer violence. If she refuses to cooperate, she faces harsh mandatory minimum sentencing.
Jay tells us to remember his home state of New York’s Rockefeller laws. I ask you to remember the story from my home state of Virginia, Kemba Smith. Kemba is poster child for how these drug laws swept up black women who were guilty of little more than being victims. She was seven months’ pregnant, had no criminal record, was charged with a nonviolent offense, and was in an abusive relationship with a man who ran a major drug ring. Still, Kemba was sentenced to 24 years in prison as a result of mandatory minimum drug laws. It is Kemba’s graduation photo on the cover of Emerge magazine that haunts the nightmare of those college-bound girls whose suburban childhoods didn’t look like Jay’s Brooklyn upbringing. Her story said this was a war with weapons powerful enough to lay to ruin the Different World dreams of black girls.
Long after the crack era ended, we continued the war on drugs. — Jay Z
Her Story Carbondale
In 1999, Sharanda Jones was 23 and had an 8-year-old daughter when she was arrested and convicted on one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Conspiracy. She was given a life sentence. Life without the possibility of parole. At 23. For a single count of a nonviolent offence. In May 2014, having already spent 15 years in a maximum security prison, she wrote a heart-wrenching letter, trying to help the world see the madness of this injustice.
“There is no reduction, no good behavior, that will ever reduce my sentence and allow me to return to society. I know that, unless President Obama (or one of his successors) commutes my sentence, I will die in prison. A life sentence in the federal system is just a very slow death.”
Her Story Crack Movie
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Clinton granted clemency to Kemba Smith in 2000. President Barack Obama granted clemency to Sharanda Jones in 2016. They are finally free, but these are just two stories out of the hundreds of thousands of women still suffering in a system where our national response to black women who are guilty of being victims of poverty, of structural inequality, of abuse, and of trauma, to lock them away; strip them of parental rights; permanently damage their ability to seek education, secure housing, start businesses, and choose their elected representatives. And it begins when they are girls. Black girls are suspended, criminalized, pushed out of school and into a juvenile system where they receive disproportionately harsh sentences, often in the wake of severe emotional and sexual trauma.
The war on drugs is an Epic Fail. — Jay Z
Herstory Tracklist
Jay and his collaborators have drawn our attention back to this critical issue. We must look and listen and grapple with the cost of this war — not just the $51 billion the United States wastes annually. (Dollars that could be spent infrastructure, education, or really anything else.) This abbreviated history asks us to calculate the cost of lost genius, broken families, hollow communities, and stolen futures caused by decades of ill-advised policing and draconian sentencing. We should do the math this video is asking of us. Then multiply it.