Once in a while, the world experiences a persona so powerful
and utterly refreshing and inspiring, the whole world falls in love with that person;
sometimes, but not often, that person becomes an international symbol of
humanitarianism and good will. The rarity of encountering such person in a
single lifetime makes such a unique person stand out in your mind like a
beacon.
In the year 1954, while right smack in the middle of rising
racial tension and imminent social change, Oprah Winfrey was born to a poor family in one of the poorest states
of the union: Mississippi. When you consider Oprah’s beginnings, the odds of
Oprah becoming Oprah, seems unfathomable: Born into poverty as the child of a
single mother who worked as a housemaid, with the likely possibility of
achieving anything great in her future appearing to be a far off shadow in the
night.
I won’t trouble you to read the ending to this story since
the world already knows Oprah and what she has become in life; what I will draw
attention to, is the fact that Oprah is probably the most powerful woman in the
world, Black or White, or of any other race. Oprah could easily forget her
roots and her lowly beginnings and saunter off into her glamorous future and
leave her past behind-but she didn’t. I greatly admire that fact that Oprah is
still a Black woman, and obviously very proud of it; and Oprah remembers her
past, and is also very proud of it.
I read the September, 2013 issue of Oprah magazine (the one
with Oprah wearing a HUGE afro), and the article about Oprah’s role in the new
movie, The Butler, had a paragraph from Oprah that moved me to tears. In this
paragraph, Oprah recounted what the historical significance of The Butler meant
to her personally. In essence, Oprah said she found herself thinking a lot
about the history behind the movie and the many people that were affected by
this history, including herself, the offspring of three generations of housemaids because “That
was all they could be”(Oprah). The choices that are held before all of us
today, for both our sons and daughters, are much better choices than those that
existed during the early days of ‘The Butler’ in his real life. But what must
not be forgotten is the fact that butlers and maids, and the many other hard
working Americans from the past, are the ones who paved the way for those
choices we have today. We owe much of our hope to the future to those who lived
in the past.
The need to recognize our pasts and where we come from is
important because “If you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where
to go?” (Oprah, 2013)
Sara Niles Author of Torn From the Inside Out
