LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Oprah Winfrey: Tennessee State University
built 785 days ago
Oprah Winfrey's broadcasting career began at age 17, when she was signed on with WTVF-TV in Nashville as a reporter/anchor. She attended Tennessee State University, where she majored in Speech Communications and Performing Arts.
Source:
Ms. Oprah Gail Winfrey was born on January 29, 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. Growing up poor in the segregated South, she was raised by various relatives, moving to Wisconsin and then to Nashville, Tennessee. Crowned Miss Black Tennessee at age 19, she left Tennessee State University and began her career in broadcasting at Nashville's WTVF-TV. Ms. Winfrey became the youngest and the first African-American woman ever to anchor the news in Nashville. She then moved to Baltimore to co-anchor the six o'clock news until she was recruited to co-host Baltimore's WJZ-TV's local talk show, "People Are Talking." The show made her a national success and was so popular that reruns were shown at night!
Source:
In 1986, Oprah got the program, The Oprah Winfrey Show. She started Harpo Productions (Oprah spelled backwards) and purchased her program. In 1988, Oprah was awarded a diploma from Tennessee State University. In January 1994, President Clinton signed the "Oprah Bill," a bill to protect children.
Source:
When she was 14, Winfrey went to live with her father in Nashville, Tennessee, and it was there that her life was put back on track. Her father insisted on hard work and discipline as a means of self-improvement, and Winfrey complied, winning a college scholarship that allowed her to attend Tennessee State University. In 1971, she began working part-time as a radio announcer for WVOL in Nashville. Two years later, after receiving a B.A. from Tennessee State, she became a reporter at WTVF-TV in Nashville. From 1976 to 1983, she lived in Baltimore, working for the ABC affiliate WJZ-TV, progressing from news anchor to cohost of the popular show, "People Are Talking." In 1984, she moved to Chicago and took over the ailing morning show, "A.M. Chicago."
Source:
Even as a small child, Winfrey would say that she wanted to make her living by talking, for she was a gifted, quick-witted speaker. In 1971, partly on the basis of her brilliant public speaking, she won the Miss Nashville Fire Prevention beauty and talent contest, which led to a job reading the news at the WVOL radio station. She chafed under her father and stepmother's curfew rules, because she was earning $15,000 per year—a good salary at the time—and felt that she was demonstrating grownup responsibility. Even after she took a job anchoring the news broadcasts of Nashville's WTVF-TV, the restrictions required by her parents remained. When, in 1976, Baltimore's WJZ-TV offered her a job anchoring the news, she leaped at the chance. She was a senior at Tennessee State University with only a few months to go for her degree, but as a friend pointed out to her, the WJZ-TV job was the chance of a lifetime.
Source:
When she was 19, Winfrey became a part-time radio reporter for station WVOL, Nashville and ... began studying speech and performing arts at Tennessee State University. She dropped out in 1972 during her sophomore year to become an Anchor at Nashville's WTVF-TV. She was the first black woman to hold that position. In 1976, she moved to WJZ-TV and after a stint as a reporter was promoted to co-anchor. Two years after her arrival, Winfrey was slotted (with some trepidation by producers who weren't sure how audiences would respond to a host who was neither white nor thin) to host their talk show People Are Talking. Their worries were unfounded for the charming, empathetic Winfrey's show was a hit and remained so for eight years.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Tennessee State University