by Kitty Kelley
That same year she was one of twelve finalists sponsored by the Black Elks Club of Nashville, a service organization formally known as the Improved Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of the World.
“I can’t remember what I said but my topic [for the two-and-a-half-minute speech] was ‘The Negro, The Constitution, and The United States.’ I delivered it in front of 10,000 people in Philadelphia and I felt really comfortable up there. I had always worried whether my slip was hanging down whenever I got up to speak but in front of 10,000 people you realize nobody can see if it’s hanging down. You can’t get scared when it’s a sea of people everywhere you look.”
Oprah won the competition at the Seventy-first Grand Lodge Convention, which honored Mayor Charles Evers of Fayette, Mississippi, with its highest award. The mayor was the older brother of Medgar Evers, the civil rights worker murdered in 1963 by a white supremacist.
While the Black Elks were meeting in Philadelphia, the white Elks met in San Francisco and voted to keep their “whites only” membership requirement. They maintained that God did not make a single black man acceptable to their “brotherhood.” At the time, a spokesman for the white Elks said their discussion, barred to the press, had been “amicable” and “in the spirit of brotherly love.”
The next year, Oprah competed in the Tennessee State Forensic Tournament, again won first place, and went to the 1971 nationals at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “I don’t recall any other black student at the nationals that year,” said Andrea Haynes, “and there certainly weren’t any among the finalists. Oprah was the only one. She performed and won almost every single day of that week, ending up in the top five.”
During a five-hour break between presentations, Oprah went shopping in San Francisco and bought a silk scarf for her teacher, who recalled the incident with delight. “She was so impressed that she had paid fifteen dollars for that scarf, and so impressed that she had bought it at Saks Fifth Avenue.” The scarf was a splurge for a seventeen-year-old girl from Nashville, Tennessee, who, in 1971, spent seventy-two cents for two pieces of Minnie Pearl fried chicken.
Losing the national tournament disappointed Oprah, who had presented a stirring reading from Margaret Walker’s novel, Jubilee, the black version of Gone With the Wind, in which a female slave named Vyry is doused with urine by the slave master’s wife, who is jealous of her beauty. Vyry is later whipped to a bloody pulp while trying to escape.
“In retrospect, it was a bold selection, putting the slave experience in the faces of whites, but Oprah, who was not an activist in any way, captured the humanity of the character and presented her without anger or bitterness,” said Ms. Haynes.
Dressed in a long cotton skirt and an old shawl, and with a white knit hairnet covering her long black hair, Oprah delivered her oration to her classmates before the state tournament.
“I will never forget the force of energy when she walked to the front of the room, already in character, her eyes sweeping across the room, making eye contact with as many of her fellow students as possible,” recalled classmate Sylvia Watts Blann more than thirty-five years later. “Without much ado, she launched into a powerful performance, relating the first-person story of a female slave as she was examined, [offered but not sold] on the block, eventually tied to a post and whipped for having too much spirit and had salt rubbed into her wounds.
“I wasn’t the only one that morning with tears in my eyes as the class was transported back one hundred and ten years to a horrifying time when white people presumed to own black people in this very nation—in this very state. I have always been struck with the way she, rather than lashing out in personal anger, chose to mirror back to us the legacy of this crime against humanity. Over the years, as Oprah went about building her career in public life, I thought back many times on the heart-wrenching reality conveyed by her performance. We knew she was special even back then.”
While the Civil Rights Act had mandated integration in public schools and public facilities, the social line separating blacks and whites remained firmly in place in Nashville in 1970. “We were all friends during the day, but you didn’t do anything with them [the black kids] after school,” said Larry Carpenter. “Oprah tried to socialize with whites and she was chastised for it. The black kids felt she dealt with the other race too much.”
“That’s when I was first called an Oreo [black on the outside, white on the inside],” Oprah recalled. “I crossed the lines and sat with the whites in cafeteria….In high school I was the teacher’s pet, which created other problems. I never spoke in dialect—I’m not sure why, perhaps I was ashamed—and I was attacked for ‘talking proper like white folks,’ for selling out.”
As a teenager, Oprah was embarrassed by the images of Africans she saw on television and in films. “I was ashamed if anybody asked, ‘You from Africa?’ in the school. I didn’t want anybody to talk about it. And if it was ever discussed in any classroom I was in, it was always about the Pygmies and the…primitive and barbarian behavior of Africans….I remember, like, wanting to get over that period really quickly. The bare-breasted National Geographic pictures? I was embarrassed by all of it.”
Being in the minority, the black students at East strengthened their numbers by voting in a bloc, especially for student body offices and superlatives, the prized designations of Most Popular, Most Handsome, Most Talented, Most Likely to Succeed, Most Bashful, etc. They banded together, nominated one person, and voted only for that person, while the white students, with several nominees, inevitably split their vote, which usually enabled the black candidate to win. “That’s why my getting elected student body president was considered such an upset,” recalled Gary Holt. “I was one of two whites running against one black, and I couldn’t have won without black support.”
At the same time, Oprah was the only black student running for vice president. Her campaign picture carried the slogan “Put a Little Color in Your Life. Vote for the Grand Ole Oprah.” She held her birthday party in the school gymnasium, and promised better food in the cafeteria and a live band (half-black, half-white) at the prom instead of records. She, too, was elected because she pulled black as well as white votes. She also won one of the coveted superlatives because, according to Cynthia Connor Shelton, she was bold enough to nominate herself. “That speaks to her self-confidence and her determination to be recognized,” said her classmate. Many years later a member of the black nominating group confirmed that Oprah had indeed nominated herself Most Popular Girl, and had won because of the all-black bloc vote.
Vernon Winfrey was not impressed by her victory. “Any dog in the street can be popular,” he said. “Who was voted Most Likely to Succeed?” He had not encouraged Oprah to run for Miss East Nashville High or Miss Wool, and he was unsympathetic when she lost both contests. He didn’t care that she wasn’t homecoming queen, tulip queen, prom queen, or even a cheerleader. He was disappointed that she was not in the National Achievement Scholarship Program for Outstanding Negro Students, because he wanted her to graduate as valedictorian, but he settled for the good grades that put her into the National Honor Society. Tapping her on the head, he said, “Get something up there that no one can take away from you.”
From the beginning he and Zelma insisted she go to the library once a week, choose a book, and write a book report for them, which exposed Oprah to the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and to the poetry of Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou. “Not only did I have homework from school, but homework at home,” said Oprah. “Plus, I was only allowed an hour a day to watch television, and that hour was always before Leave It to Beaver came on! I hated that.”
She complained bitterly and constantly about her father’s strictness. “Vernon was a tough old bird,” said Gary Holt, “and he made sure he knew where she was every minute of the day….There was not much socializing between the races in those days, but if it had been acceptable, Oprah and I might have gotten together….We were great
friends and shared the same strong Christian beliefs—then.”
Oprah wrote in Holt’s yearbook:
You have showed me more by your actions, by the way you live from day to day, that there is truly only One Way, Jesus Christ! And that without Him taking control, without Him running the whole show, life is just an endless go-round with no meaning.
“Interracial dating was really not tolerated when we were in high school,” Holt said, “but Oprah wanted to pull a fast one on Vernon. So she invited me to her house and made him think I was her date. Vernon was stunned when he opened the door and saw me standing there. He was cordial but obviously concerned about a white boy calling on his daughter. It was like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and I was Sidney Poitier. Oprah made him sweat for a while; then she started laughing and told him we were working on plans for the prom.”
Oprah and her black friends teased their white speech teacher in the same way. “If we were in a department store or a restaurant, they would yell at me from across the room: ‘Hey, Mama. Come on over here.’ Then they’d roar with laughter when all the white people turned and saw that I was their mama.” Ms. Haynes frequently drove her forensic students to tournaments in the state in her little red Mustang. Once, to get an early-morning start, she suggested Oprah spend the night and share a bedroom with her younger sister, who was visiting. “My sister was coming out of the shower and Oprah was talking on the phone to one of her friends: ‘Yeah, she’s in the shower right now,’ she said. ‘You know how these white girls love to wash their hair. All the time washing their hair.’ ”
The struggle for civil rights had hit Nashville hard in the 1960s, with boycotts, sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, and marches—all part of the racial turbulence rumbling across the South in those years. By the time Oprah was in high school, affirmative action was taking hold to give blacks, so long denied, a lift toward equal opportunity.
As the first black student body officer at East, and someone known in all the black churches of Nashville, Oprah was selected as one of the delegates to the 1971 White House Conference on Children and Youth. The director, Stephen Hess, had promised “an honest cross-section of American youth…not just…white middle-class student activists.” He said the fourteen-to-twenty-four-year age group would reflect the demographics of the country. In the end, minorities, who comprised 30 percent of the delegates, were intentionally overrepresented, so as not to smack of tokenism. In later years Oprah would say she was “the only student selected from my state,” but her slight exaggeration does not diminish the honor.
She attended the conference in Estes Park, Colorado, with one thousand delegates, most of whom were clean, crew cut–wearing Christians. James S. Kunen, author of The Strawberry Statement, also attended. “I didn’t think they could find this many straight kids in America,” he said. As traditional as the young delegates looked, their recommendations from the conference were anything but conventional.
For five hours in one session, some of the crew cuts sat in the front rows openly smoking pot as their drug task force made its report on legalizing marijuana. The conference attendees denounced the invasion of Cambodia, opposed the war in Vietnam, supported a withdrawal of U.S. troops by year’s end, and asked for an end to the draft. They proposed a guaranteed income of $6,500 for a family of four, stipulated that one quarter of the national budget be allocated for education, condemned slavery and its evil legacy as “the country’s darkest blemish,” and asked President Richard Nixon to proclaim racism “the cancer of American society.”
Despite the antiestablishment resolutions of her delegation, Oprah did not return home a political activist. Quite the contrary. “The only march she ever took part in,” said her boyfriend Anthony Otey, “was the March of Dimes.”
That march led Oprah to WVOL, the black radio station in Nashville, to look for sponsorship. “She explained that she walked so many miles and I would have to pay for the number of miles she walked,” said John Heidelberg, one of the disc jockeys, who later became president and owner of the station. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ ”
A few weeks later Oprah returned to collect the money. “I admired her voice,” he recalled. “She was very articulate. Her grammar was good….I’m from outside the boondocks of Mississippi. The concept and image that people get of blacks living in the South can sometimes be very negative….[When I heard Oprah] I thought, ‘Hey, here’s a young lady who can go places.’ ”
He asked if she would be willing to make a tape. He took her into the newsroom, ripped some copy off the wire, and listened to her read in a rich, deep, clear voice without a drawl or dialect. He promised to give the tape to the station manager.
“[For years] it was hard for women to get into radio,” he said. But when the FCC required radio stations to begin affirmative action programs, things began to change. “Station managers hired them because they needed a minority. They felt like, ‘Well, we’ve got to protect our license, so we’ll hire some females.’…We were a training ground for a lot of young blacks who otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to make it in radio.”
Heidelberg soon convinced WVOL management to take a chance on the seventeen-year-old and give her on-the-job training. “Oprah knew she had something on the ball,” he said. “She didn’t feel intimidated or threatened by anything. Nothing bothered her.”
“She was aggressive,” said Dana Davidson, who worked at WVOL with Oprah. “She knew where she was going.”
Shortly after Oprah started working part-time, the station manager’s house burned down, and the fire department responded so quickly that the manager decided the radio station would participate in the upcoming Miss Fire Prevention contest. Each year several Nashville businesses selected a candidate, usually a white teenage girl with red hair, to represent them in the contest. WVOL, whose call sign derives from Tennessee being known as the Volunteer State, volunteered Oprah. “I was the Negro surprise of the day,” she said.
“Miss Fire Prevention was a big deal back then,” said Nancy Solinski, who held the title in 1970. “It was not a beauty contest. The prize was based on your ability to speak, your poise, and your presentation, because your main responsibility was to go around to school assemblies and talk about the importance of obeying fire safety rules. Up to 1971, all the winners had been white. But that year Oprah was one of fifteen contestants. She was the only black, but she never blinked because she had it all and she knew it. She was absolutely color-blind to herself. The judges were all white old men, and when she walked out to present her piece you could almost see them thinking, ‘What does she think she’s doing here?’ ”
The judges asked the contestants what they wanted to do with their lives. Oprah said, “I believe in truth and I want to perpetuate truth. So I want to be a journalist like Barbara Walters.”
Next they asked what the contestants would do if given a million dollars. Most said they would give it to charity, help the poor, or buy their parents a new house. Not Oprah.
“Lord, you just watch me,” she said, lifting her eyes to Heaven. “If I had a million dollars, I would be a spendin’ fool. I’m not quite sure what I would spend it on, but I would spend, spend, spend. Just be a spendin’ fool.”
“Everybody laughed,” said Nancy Solinski, “and I was pleased, although frankly surprised, that she won. I put the crown on her head, so grateful that the judges had gotten over their own prejudices. It was time.”
John Heidelberg had accompanied Oprah to the event. “The crowd was just overwhelmed with her, and you could see that she was just loving every minute of it.” He remembered how thrilled she was to have newspaper photographers rushing to take her picture. “ ‘Here I am,’ she’d yell. Oprah loved the camera. ‘Where’s the camera? Here I am. Come see me.’ She loved the limelight.” He laughed as he recalled her reactions. “[She thought,] ‘This is great. Hey, I love this! This is going places!’ ”
A few weeks after riding atop a parade float as Miss Fire Prevent
ion, Oprah walked with the class of 1971 to receive her diploma and graduate. Fifteen years later, East Nashville High School graduated its last class and became East Literature Magnet School. Even with the school doors closed, many from the class wanted to stay connected, but Oprah never looked back.
“Not even to contribute a brick,” said Larry Carpenter at the East Alumni House as he walked up the path paved with legacy bricks carrying the names of former students and the years in which they graduated. The bricks, which cost fifty dollars, finance scholarships for poor children in Nashville. As of 2008, there was no brick in the name of the school’s most famous graduate. “I have written to Oprah many times in hopes that she might want to contribute to our scholarship fund, but I’ve never received a reply.”
The president of the East Nashville High Alumni Association, Patsy Rainey Cline, also tried to solicit Oprah’s support for the school’s scholarship program, but to no avail. “She has not shown any interest in any activity of the school since she left Nashville….She seems so interested in underprivileged children and different nationalities of black children, and that situation certainly is prevalent at East High, but…”
Considering the millions of dollars Oprah would later give to charity, Larry Carpenter and Patsy Rainey Cline cannot be faulted for thinking her exclusion of East High is deliberate. Luvenia Harrison Butler felt Oprah ignored her high school in Nashville because of painful memories. “It’s all part of her secretive past,” she said.
Yet when the class of ’71 decided to have a reunion in 1994, they again contacted Oprah, and this time she responded by saying that she’d like to have the reunion on her television show. “We spent weeks getting all the names and addresses of everyone for her producers,” Luvenia said. “It was a lot of work, but we thought it was a great way to bring everyone together. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite happen that way.”