Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [40]
Oprah did not win, place, or show in the race for Miss Black America. “As district pageant organizer I had access to those final tallies and ascertained that she came in number 34 out of 36 contestants—almost flat bottom,” recalled El Greco Brown. Oprah dismissed her loss by blaming the winner. “The girl from California won because she stripped,” she said. Yet the New York Times coverage makes no mention of the beautiful California singer who won as having performed a striptease.
During the week, Oprah, who had been sponsored by her radio station, told Dr. Burch that she was going “to be a big TV personality.” After the pageant, she returned to Nashville ready to raise her game.
“Our general manager got a call from WVOL that they had a girl who wanted to get into broadcasting,” said Chris Clark, the former anchor, producer, and news director of WLAC, later WTVF-TV. “So I was told that I had to interview her.”
The station had already hired Bill Perkins, the first black face on Nashville television, now deceased, and Ruth Ann Leach, the first woman, who said, “I was the first female fanny to sit on the news desk next to the anchor during a newscast. This was back when NewsChannel 5 was trying desperately to meet its FCC obligation to diversify the on-air talent. So there was Bill Perkins and me. Everyone else on the air was white and male.”
Oprah said she had been pursued by the CBS affiliate for the on-air position, but Clark remembers that WVOL pushed for her hiring, and Joseph Davis, a cameraman, formerly with WDCN-TV, the public education channel, concurred. “There was a small group of young black people in Nashville that the NAACP got behind to place in positions above entry level—in middle management and on-camera,” Davis said. “Oprah was part of that group to come out of WVOL.” In 2008 he produced a photograph of the group taken on the set at WDCN, when they appeared to discuss “Blacks and Their Role in the Media.” “Out of the ten people in this picture, Oprah is the only one who did not get sidetracked by marriage or children. She never let life interfere with her ambition to get to the top.”
Chris Clark was sensitive to the demands for diversity at that time. “I felt we needed to look like the face of Nashville, which was then 80 percent white and 20 percent black. We had a brave mayor [Clifton Beverly Briley] who said that segregation was over and we had to move toward integration.… I was responsive to this because when I was coming up in television in the 1960s, it was a white-bread world—no room for blacks, women, Jews, or Greeks like me. My real name is Christopher Botsaris, but I had to change it to get a job on the air. By the time I got to WLAC, Nashville had been through the really rough civil rights battles, but we still needed to show that we were committed to integration.
“As far as I’m concerned, Oprah was not a token. Yeah, she was black and we needed a black face, and she was a woman, so I guess that helped. But she was a no-brainer for me,” he said. “She was drop-dead gorgeous, very well spoken, and known in town from being Miss Black Nashville and Little Miss Spark Plug or whatever she was [Miss Fire Prevention]. So I made her a reporter—we didn’t have correspondents in those days. I sent her out with a Bell and Howell camera to cover city hall. I didn’t find out until later that she didn’t know what the hell she was doing.”
Years later Oprah admitted she had lied on her job application and during her job interview about her experience, but she walked into her first assignment with great determination. “I announced to everybody there, ‘This is my first day on the job, and I don’t know anything. Please help me because I have told the news director at Channel 5 that I know what I’m doing. Pleeeeze help me.’ And they did. And from that point on all those councilmen became my friends.”
Chris