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$25,000 to Art Against AIDS/Chicago. In addition, she generated more than $1 million in public donations for the World Summit for Children and UNICEF after a show devoted to the plight of starving children. She pledged $500,000 over two years to the Chicago Academy for the Arts and bought all the Broadway opening-night tickets (954 seats) for August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson to benefit A Better Chance, or ABC, which provides scholarships to the best schools for students of color who are disadvantaged but academically able. She also flew Nelson Mandela’s daughter and son-in-law from Boston to South Africa to witness her father’s release from prison after twenty-seven years. Oprah’s publicist told the Chicago Sun-Times that Mandela wanted to avoid “his children sitting around idle for three or four days while they waited for him to be released.” In a prime-time television salute, Bob Hope presented Oprah with the America’s Hope Award for “her career achievements and her humanitarian endeavors.” She was so grateful for the celebrity tribute that she sent Hope a bouquet of roses every week until his death in 2003.

• In 1991 she earned $80 million and wrote checks for $100,000 to buy books for the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, $50,000 to the Rev. Cecil Williams’s Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, and $1,000 to the Purple Heart Cruise.

• In 1992 she earned $88 million and wrote a check for $50,000 to the LaPorte County Child Abuse Prevention Council in Indiana, near her farm, and $30,000 to Every Woman’s Place, a women’s shelter in Muskegon, Michigan. She also donated twenty Dakota adapters for deaf students for closed-caption TV shows.

• In 1993 she earned $98 million, and after filming There Are No Children Here in the Chicago projects, she donated her $500,000 salary to endow scholarships for low-income children in the Henry Horner Homes through a foundation she named “There Are No Children Here.” She gave $50,000 to the Holy Family Preservation Society, one of Chicago’s oldest churches, and $1 million to the city’s predominantly African American Providence–St. Mel School. “The money will go towards setting up scholarships for disadvantaged children,” she told reporters.

• In 1994 she earned $105 million and donated her $10,000 award from the Council on Women’s Issues in Chicago to Providence–St. Mel. She held her first charity auction of her clothes and raised $150,000, which she divided between Hull House in Chicago and FamiliesFirst in Sacramento. More important, she felt financially secure enough to begin engaging again in her giving. This time she made a gesture that captured the country’s attention: she would single-handedly stop the cycle of poverty in America. She held a press conference to say that she would start in Chicago by setting up a foundation called Families for a Better Life, with the intention of moving one hundred families out of the projects and into private housing, giving them job training, health care, financial counseling, educational assistance, and $30,000 in financial aid for two years. She pledged $6 million to her program. “I want to destroy the welfare mentality, the belief in victimization,” she said.

Oprah had no sympathy for welfare recipients and frequently berated them. “I was a welfare daughter, just like you.… How did you let yourselves become welfare mothers? Why did you choose this? I didn’t.” The women looked ashamed that they were not good enough to be accepted by Oprah. “When Welfare Warriors, a Milwaukee group of activist moms in poverty, were invited to appear [on one of her welfare shows], we accepted … despite our anger at Oprah’s betrayal of African American moms in poverty and her frequent attacks on all moms who receive welfare,” wrote Pat Gowens, editor of Mother Warriors Voice. “Her contempt for impoverished mothers actually increased Welfare Warriors’ membership when African American moms joined specifically to picket Oprah. (A typical Oprah assault on a welfare mom in her audience: ‘But you sit home with your feet up collecting that monthly check.’).