Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [49]
Her demotion, while hellish at the time, proved to be her crucible, forcing her to develop the formula she needed for future success. She learned that flaming ambition combined with grinding hard work and enduring stamina would reap rich rewards. “I’ve kept a diary since I was 15,” she said, “and I remember writing in the diary … ‘I wonder if I’ll ever be able to master this so-called success!’ I was always frustrated with myself, thinking I wasn’t doing enough. I just had to achieve.”
In addition to working overtime on her job at WJZ, she joined the Association of Black Media Workers and gave speeches throughout the city about women in broadcasting. She became active in her church as a member of Bethel A.M.E., and began mentoring young girls, speaking at schools all over the city. She espoused the goals of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had impressed her the first time she heard him speak, in 1969. “He lit a fire in me that changed the way I saw life.… He said, ‘Excellence is the best deterrent to racism. Therefore be excellent,’ and ‘If you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.’ That was what I lived by.” As a teenager she made a poster out of construction paper with Jackson’s words and taped it to her mirror, where it stayed until she left Nashville. In Baltimore she helped organize a fund-raising rally for Jackson’s Operation PUSH (People United to Serve Humanity) at the Civic Center.
She attended Sunday services every week, always sitting in the center of the second row of the sixteen-hundred-seat church, and became a beloved fixture in the black community through her speaking engagements as well as her political support of local politicians such as Kurt Schmoke and Kweisi Mfume.
“Oprah learned about the city’s power structure, who was important and what made them powerful,” recalled Gary Elion. “She learned the names and faces, where the bones were buried, everything about the power structure, and she learned to use that information to her benefit in gathering the news. She became a force in the city very quickly, because she knew how the city worked. She was very bright, and I knew she was going to go far. She wasn’t terribly partisan—at least she never talked about it with me—but she was highly astute politically. She seemed to have a natural instinct for it and used it to her advantage.”
Oprah increased her visibility in Baltimore through Bethel A.M.E. as much as through her job on television. “I met her … through her church,” said Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of the female a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. “I was contacted to work collaboratively with her on a project that they would then present. I interviewed Oprah and created a script from that interview, [plus] poetry and song by Sweet Honey. The centerpiece was an excerpt she performed from Jubilee by Margaret [Walker] Alexander.… We premiered [“To Make a Poet Black and Beautiful and Bid Her Sing”] at Morgan State in Baltimore, and performed in Nashville and in New York City.”
“Oprah wanted to be an actress more than anything else,” said Jane McClary, a former producer at WJZ.
“She used to put on this one-woman show [with] which, through poetry and dramatic reading, she reenacted black history,” recalled WJZ’s Richard Sher. “And she was fabulous. She played to standing ovations.”
Bill Baker also remembered Oprah’s “little recitals … she always invited me and I always made a point of going.… She became notable in the black community.”
Years later Oprah’s impact on black women in Baltimore became the subject of an academic book by Johns Hopkins University sociology professor Katrina Bell McDonald, titled Embracing Sisterhood. “These women marvel at Oprah’s staying power—her ability to have survived some of the most difficult