Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [194]
Oprah tried to do with the Cabrini Green girls what Vernon had done with her: take them to the library and make them read books. She gave them dictionaries and ordered them to learn five new words a day. She lectured them: “I was like a lot of you. I was a hot little momma.” She told Ms. magazine, “I shoot a very straight shot. ‘Get pregnant and I’ll break your face! Don’t tell me you want to do great things in your life and still not be able to tell a boy no. You want something to love and to hug, tell me and I’ll buy you a puppy.’
“When we talk about goals and they say they want Cadillacs, I say, ‘If you cannot talk correctly, if you cannot read or do math, if you become pregnant, if you drop out of school, you will never have a Cadillac. I guarantee it! And if you get D’s or F’s on your report card, you’re out of this group. Don’t tell me you want to do great things in your life, if all you carry to school is a radio!’ ”
Even then Oprah was aware of the steep odds. “One girl on the Cabrini Green show said her goal was to have lots of babies, so she’d get more money from welfare.… We have twenty-four in our group. Maybe we’ll save two.”
The group did not last long. After Oprah’s show went national, she said she no longer had the time, energy, or resources to shoulder a program that she felt needed more structure. “What happened was that when we took the girls out we would do nice things, good things, fun things … [but] what I realized was that those things were just activities. Good things to do but just activities.… I wasn’t really able to deeply impact the way the girls thought about themselves. So I failed.”
Oprah withdrew from personal involvement in her giving, but she continued writing checks and making fund-raising speeches and appearances for worthy causes. From what is available in the public record—Harpo press releases, plus Oprah’s interviews with newspapers and magazines—one learns the following:
• In 1986 she earned $10 million and donated $13,000 to buy a mile in the four-thousand-mile chain of hand-holding across America to raise money to fight hunger and homelessness in what was promoted as “the largest number of celebrities ever assembled.” Oprah told Time, “My mile will be for people who can’t afford the $10 [standing fee]. No rich people in my mile.”
• In 1987 she earned $31 million and donated $10,000 to the Marva Collins Preparatory School in Chicago and $50,000 to the Vernon Winfrey Scholarships at TSU, for which she would contribute $770,000 over eight years.
• In 1988 she earned $37 million and donated her Revlon fee of $100,000 to Chicago’s Corporate/Community Schools of America. She wrote a check for $2,000 for the Special Olympics and one for $7,000 to provide hot meals for elderly citizens in Alexandra, South Africa, which she continued for three years. For this she received the National Conference of Christians and Jews Humanitarian Award for her “involvement in a college scholarship program and humanitarian aid to South Africa.”
• In 1989 she earned $55 million and wrote a check for $1 million to Morehouse College for the Oprah Winfrey Scholars, to which she’d contributed $12 million by 2004. She also gave $25,000 to Chicago’s House of the Good Shepherd, a shelter for battered and abused women; $10,000 to Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which provides services for the city’s poor; $25,000 to the Corporate/Community Schools of America; $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise; $40,000 to the combined benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); $100,000 to the Rape Treatment Center, Santa Monica, California. In addition, she raised $1 million for victims of Hurricane Hugo during her show from Charleston, South Carolina.
• In 1990 she earned $68 million and wrote checks for $20,000 to the B. Robert Lewis House in Eagan, Minnesota, to open a shelter for battered women;