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By Root 1145 0

Andre Walker, would make sure he looked like Oprah. He had also been promised that he would be on for half the show, and while the other look-alikes each got three minutes on air, he was not brought on until the very end, when Oprah was doing the sign-off. When the program aired during sweeps, the credits ran over his appearance. He sued Ladies’ Home Journal for breach of contract, and the magazine paid him a settlement. He later said his treatment by Harpo was “ugly,” but he got revenge a few days later when Joan Rivers decided to do a mock bridal shower for Oprah on her new talk show and invited the transvestite to appear in a Vera Wang wedding gown flanked by look-alikes for Madonna and Cher. After that show, Oprah closed the door on Joan Rivers and never spoke to the comedienne again, even after appearing with her three times on The Tonight Show early in her career.

Oprah and her producers turned themselves inside out for shows during sweeps, because the ratings then determined how much the show could charge for license fees and advertising rates. Higher ratings meant more money, so sweeps shows tended to be highly controversial, to increase viewership, and Oprah awarded $10,100 bonuses to her producers if their sweeps programs achieved at least a 10.1 rating, as measured by Nielsen. For the February 1987 sweeps, she presented a show that shot her ratings through the roof. She took her cameras into the town of Cumming, in all-white Forsyth County, Georgia, which had received negative publicity when members of the Ku Klux Klan threw bricks at civil rights workers celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. A week after the brick-throwing incident, the Rev. Hosea Williams organized a march of twenty thousand people into Forsyth County in one of the biggest civil rights demonstrations since the 1960s. They, too, were attacked with rocks and stones and shouts of “Nigger, go home.”

With the attention of the world upon her, Oprah ventured into the all-white community and excluded any participation on the show by civil rights representatives. “We’re here simply to ask why this community has not allowed black people to live here since 1912,” she said, “and we felt that the people of Cumming are in the best position to answer that question.”

Rev. Hosea Williams protested the exclusion of civil rights representatives. He said he had been misled by Oprah’s producers into believing that blacks would have an opportunity to express their views. Consequently, he said he and his demonstrators would march with signs that read, “Like Forsyth, The Oprah Winfrey Show Turns All White.” The protesters were arrested at the restaurant where Oprah was broadcasting, charged with unlawful assembly, and thrown into jail. Oprah’s cameras showed the police handcuffing them. Afterward she said she was “very, very sorry” about the arrest. “I have nothing but respect for Rev. Hosea Williams.”

Her producers had selected one hundred of the county’s thirty-eight thousand citizens to be on-camera, representing a range of opinion: some felt blacks deserved equality; others did not.

“Tell me,” said Oprah, “where did the people come from who were shouting, ‘Nigger go home’?”

Frank Shirley, head of the Committee to Keep Forsyth White, said, “This was the largest white people’s protest against communism and race mixing in the last thirty years.… Many of [those marchers] are outright communists and homosexuals.…”

“You’re not just anti-black,” Oprah said, “you’re also anti-gay, too.”

“I’m opposed to communism, race mixing, and low morals, and homosexuals are of low morals, in my opinion.”

Oprah asked another town resident, “What’s the difference between a ‘black person’ and a ‘nigger’ for you?” She was told, “Blacks stayed at home during the civil rights march. Niggers are the ones that marched.… A nigger is one like Hosea Williams. He wants to come up here and cause trouble.”

Oprah listened to a liberal businesswoman talk about “us” and “them.”

“I like the way you speak of ‘them,’ ” Oprah said. “It’s like black people are from Mars or something.