Oprah Winfrey: Getting My Library Card Was Like Citizenship

"Books were my path to personal freedom.  I learned to read at age 3 and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi." (Oprah Winfrey)

How did a young black girl raised on a farm with no running water nor electricity grow up to be a billionaire?  It all started with a library card.

Oprah Winfrey spent her childhood on a farm in Mississippi where she wore potato sacks as dresses. The daughter of a broken home, her father remarried.  It was her dad who instilled in her the importance of education, taking her to the public library every two weeks where she withdrew five titles.  "Books were my path to personal freedom.  I learned to read at age 3 and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi."  Not only did Oprah have to read the books she borrowed but she had to present a book report to her parents about each one.  While other children were watching Leave it to Beaver, Oprah was visiting the public library.  

Oprah's passion for reading allowed her the chance to dream.  As she explained: 

"As a young girl in Mississippi I had big dreams at a time when being a Negro child you weren't supposed to dream big.  I dreamed anyway.  Books did that to me.  Books allowed me to see a world beyond the front porch of my grandmother's shotgun house and gave me the power to see possibilities beyond what was allowed at the time:  beyond economic and social realities, beyond classrooms with no books and unqualified teachers, beyond false beliefs and prejudice that veiled the minds of so many men and women of the time.  For me, those dreams started when I heard the stories of my rich heritage.  When I read about Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune and Frederick Douglass.  I knew that there was possibility for me." (http://www.ilovelibraries.org/article/reading-life-oprah-winfrey)

Oprah Winfrey's talk show, which debuted in the 1980's, was seen by more than 40 million Americans each week, as well as millions of viewers worldwide,  Oprah's Book Club, which debuted in 1996, sewed the seeds for new readers.  Ten thousand copies of each selection were sent to over 3500 public and secondary schools.  Oprah's Book Club has boosted sales for authors, who would normally sell thousands of books to hundreds of thousands or even millions.  

Oprah has furthered her love of reading with her Oprah magazine which first hit newsstands in 2000. Among other categories, the magazine has a book review section.  While back on her Mississippi farm, she only had an audience of two for her book reviews, now she has a readership of about 2.5 million.  Upon receiving a United Nations Humanitarian award in 2004, Oprah said:  "Getting my library card was like citizenship."  It paved the way for this self-made billionaire.

Oprah Winfrey at 2 years old, only a year before she learned how to read courtesy http://www.oprah.com/pressroom/Oprah-Winfreys-Official-Biography.

Richard Wright's "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"

"There was but one place where a black boy who knows no trade can get a job.  And that's where the houses and faces are white, where the trees, lawns and hedges are green.  My first job was an optical company in Jackson, Mississippi.  The morning I applied I stood straight and neat before the boss, answering his questions with straight yessirs and nosirs.  I was very careful to pronounce my sirs distinctly, in order that he might know that I was polite, that I knew where I was, and that I knew he was a white man.  I wanted that job badly." (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/white/anthology/wright.html)

Richard Wright grew up in in Mississippi, "where nothing green ever grew in [his yard]".  In the 1910's, he remembers an early lesson his Mom taught him about Jim Crow laws when she tanned his backside for getting into a battle with the white boys from the other side of the tracks, even though he came home with a three inch gash behind his ear.

Wright talks about losing his first factory job because he called his boss Pease instead of Mr. Pease. He talks what was accepted conversation and what was taboo for a black man; how he had to respond constantly with "yes sir" or "no sir" to a white man; how, when he entered an elevator full of whites, he had to remove his hat, even if he had a handful of packages.

Wright remembers frantically pedalling home one night from a delivery to a white home, and being stopped and questions by a police officer, just for being in a white neighbourhood after dark.  He remembers not being allowed to meet the gaze of the white guests at the hotel where he worked.

He learned how to "lie, cheat and steal" to eat and live once he moved to Memphis, Tennessee.  It was in Memphis that he met a Roman Catholic white man sympathetic to his cause.  Wright wanted to borrow books from the local library, but blacks were denied the simple right to a library card. Wright's co-worker lent him his card.  Wright would write a note that said:  "Please let this nigger boy have the following books."  He signed the note with his co-worker's signature.  So as not to alert the librarian that the books were actually for Wright, "[He] would stand at the desk, hat in hand, looking as unbookish as possible."  For more on Richard Wright, read "The Freedom of a Library Card" at http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2011/06/freedom-of-library-card.html.

Wright later moved to Chicago where he penned the famous novels Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945).  He finished his years writing in France, far away from the tentacles of Jim Crow.

Richard Wright received pennies from men in a Mississippi saloon courtesy http://www.blackpast.org/aah/wright-richard-1908-1960.