Caryn Eliane Johnson better known as Whoopi Goldberg, has many achievements from being an American actress, award winning comedian, television host, human rights advocate, and mother. Whoopi was born on November 13th 1955 in Chelsea, New York City raised by a single mother Emma Johnson with her younger brother Clyde.” Goldberg's father abandoned the family, and her single mother worked at a variety of jobs—including teaching and nursing—to make ends meet.” (Biography.com Editors, Paragraph 3) Ever since Whoopi was a little girl she enjoyed imitating people on TV, and making her family laugh, she liked the idea of being able to play different characters she started performing when she was just eight. Growing up on the streets of New York influenced …show more content…
Whoopi started out in Improvisational group theater and helped find the San Diego Repertory while living in the San Francisco area. “She starred in a popular one-woman production in 1983, and in 1985 she won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Recording. That year, Goldberg's success with The Color Purple launched a highly visible acting career. She won an Academy Award in 1991 for her performance in Ghost, and in 2007 she embarked on a lengthy run as moderator of the TV talk show The View.” (Biograpy.com Editors, Paragraph 1) The one women show starring Whoopie Goldberg the Spook Show has caught attention of many New Yorkers that it became sold out every time, and of course caught the attention of many directors as well. “By 1984, director Mike Nichols had moved The Spook Show to a Broadway stage, and in 1985, Goldberg won a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album for the recording of skits taken from the show. At the same time, she began to receive significant attention from Hollywood insiders. Director Steven Spielberg cast Goldberg in the leading female role of his 1985 production of The Color Purple (adapted from the novel by Alice Walker), a film that went on to earn 10 Academy Awards and five Golden Globe nominations. Goldberg herself received an …show more content…
Her career shows Americans that no matter where you come from you can always pursue your dream, and she sets a great example of that, coming from the bottom of New York City and rising to the top with over 40 awards, and 58 nominations, and being one of the first African American in New York City’s show business.” Whoopi possessed yet another quality which made her a rare commodity in the world of show business during the late seventies. It had nothing to do with her race, outfits, or clever stage name but derived from her special gifts. She could skillfully observe the inequities and inanities of contemporary life and express herself in a pungent manner. Audience members- whether white or black, male or female- responded well to her piercing commentary, which made them think while simultaneously amusing them due to the structure of her verbal shtick and physically unique stage presence. (Parish, pg. 66) Goldberg’s career has helped society in numerous ways by giving back to the community, being a Human Rights Advocate, helping the environment, being a black role model, and supporting charities, and foundations. Overlooking Whoopie’s amazing career, and accomplishments she has also brought tears, and laughter to the homes, of millions Americans, and people around the world. She spread a worldwide message telling people to
Annie Turnbo Malone was an entrepreneur and was also a chemist. She became a millionaire by making some hair products for some black women. She gave most of her money away to charity and to promote the African American. She was born on august 9, 1869, and was the tenth child out of eleven children that where born by Robert and Isabella turnbo. Annie’s parents died when she was young so her older sister took care of her until she was old enough to take care of herself.
The athlete I chose is Natasha Watley. She is a professional softball player and the first African-American female to play on the USA softball team in the Olympics. She’s a former collegiate 4-time First Team All-American who played for the UCLA Bruins, the USA Softball Women’s National Team, and for the USSSA Pride. She helped the Bruins will multiple championships and also holds numerous records and one of the few players to bat at least .400 with 300 hits, 200 runs, and 100 stolen bases. She’s also the career hits leader in the National Pro Fast pitch. She won the gold medal in the 2004 summer Olympics and a silver in the Beijing Olympics. She was inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame in 2014.
Rosie the riveter was the face of recruiting women into the Armed Forces during WWII. The increasing demand for soldiers was not being filled fast enough by just males. As a result, between the years 1940 and 1945, the percentage of female service members increased from 27% to 37%. Even on the civilian side of things, the ratio of married working women outside of their homes increased to one out of every four. The population of women that did not join the war was prompted by Rosie the Riveter’s iconic image to work in one of the many munitions industries throughout the US. In 1943, not only had the female population contributed exponential numbers in support of the war; but women had begun to dominate. Reports indicate that more than 310,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry; this made up more than half of the total workforce. Prior to this moment in history, women’s involvement in the aircraft industry was merely one percent.
Singer/actress Lena Horne's primary occupation was nightclub entertaining, a profession she pursued successfully around the world for more than 60 years, from the 1930s to the 1990s. In conjunction with her club work, she also maintained a recording career that stretched from 1936 to 2000 and brought her three Grammys, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989; she appeared in 16 feature films and several shorts between 1938 and 1978; she performed occasionally on Broadway, including in her own Tony-winning one-woman show, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music in 1981-1982; and she sang and acted on radio and television. Adding to the challenge of maintaining such a career was her position as an African-American facing discrimination personally and in her profession during a period of enormous social change in the U.S. Her first job in the 1930s was at the Cotton Club, where blacks could perform, but not be admitted as customers; by 1969, when she acted in the film Death of a Gunfighter, her character's marriage to a white man went unremarked in the script. Horne herself was a pivotal figure in the changing attitudes about race in the 20th century; her middle-class upbringing and musical training predisposed her to the popular music of her day, rather than the blues and jazz genres more commonly associated with African-Americans, and her photogenic looks were sufficiently close to Caucasian that frequently she was encouraged to try to "pass" for white, something she consistently refused to do. But her position in the middle of a social struggle enabled her to become a leader in that struggle, speaking out in favor of racial integration and raising money for civil rights causes. By the end of the century, she could look back at a life that was never short on conflict, but that could be seen ultimately as a triumph.
Jill Stacey Moreland(born Itabari Njeri) was born in Brooklyn, New York. She started off as being a singer/actress; but she found a calling in journalism. She obtained her B.S. from Boston University, and then later on she received her M.S. form Columbia University. She worked as a writer for numerous projects, and then was the author of three books. She wrote “Family Portraits and Personal Escapades,” “The Challenge of Diversity”, and “Reflections of a New World Black.” Currently Jill Stacey does public speaking at Universities about memoir, multiculturalism, and ethnic conflict.
During the 2004 NAACP awards ceremony at Washington, D.C., in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the landmark case Brown vs. Board of Education , Bill Cosby delivers a speech, which would be subsequently referred to as “The Pound Cake Speech, criticizing the lifestyle and lack of parenting in the African–American community. The speech has been severely criticized for it is delivery and topics expressed within it. Author Jerome Corsi notes, "Cosby was attacked both for his flippant tone and because his argument appeared to 'blame the victim' for the racial inequality and racial injustice suffered." The purpose of this essay is to examine why the use of comedy, partitioning of listeners, and scapegoating of African-American parents, as the sole cause of African-American social problems, lead to the poor reception of Cosby's speech.
Her parents who at that time could not understand the choices she made are very happy for their daughter and what she has accomplish. When she left her home at the middle of a fight and never went back. She said,” I had to make my own way” and then lived in a Manhattan dance studio where she was training. Then she got an apartment with some friends in Manhattan Hell’s Kitchen. Since the time she move out of her home she started her showbiz career as a dancer in stage musicals and most notably in her tour to Golden musicals of Broadway and in a Japanese tour. Then she audition to be a fly girl in Fox’s hit comedy “In living Colors,” she beat out 2,000 other contenders in a nation wide competition. Then she cracked into Hollywood and she wanted to make a transition to acting, but she followed Color producer Keenan Ivory Wayans advice to stay with the show for a while before making any attempt to move on.
Oprah Winfrey achieved great success in her various endeavors, growing from a news reporter in Nashville to the world-famous talk show host she is today. During the 1980s, talk shows were a crucial part of daytime television. Shows were organized based upon their content and varied greatly in subject. The popularity of talk shows led many people to enter this field, leading to a constant struggle for airtime. Oprah’s rise to fame began when she moved from her hometown in Nashville, to college in Baltimore and ultimately to Chicago, where she lives today. She appeared on an early morning television program called A.M. Chicago, which was later retitled The Oprah Winfrey Show which aired its first episode on September 8, 1986. Talk shows like Oprah’s were wildly popular, especially to women, because they focused on entertaining their viewers rather than discussing political problems. The thirty-minute to hour-long programs allowed for people to escape their problems, even if only for a short period of time (Rose). Biographer, Ilene Cooper took on the challenge of writing a biography about the complex and extraordinary life of Oprah Winfrey. In an article on the Kirkus Review website, published in 2010, a critic enjoys how the author of the biography, Up close: Oprah Winfrey, “makes excellent use of many quotes from interviews, Oprah’s own writing and, of course, her television show” (“Oprah Winfrey”). This reviewer appreciates how the biographer uses all of her resources to understand more information about Oprah. Some of Oprah’s greatest contributions to society are her generous donations to several organizations, and the way she encourages individuals to take actions that can not on...
In 1991, she landed a job as a part-time legal commentator for Court TV. In 1992, she had a contract with the Today Show as their legal correspondent. She managed to land “hard-to-get” interviews with some of the most famous people in the world including Mike Tyson. Those interviews are what led to her getting national fame. She also gained respect for her reporting on such trials as O.J. Simpson and Lorena Bobbit.
Winfrey’s early life was filled with arduous hurdles from the beginning, she was raised in a small podunk town in Mississippi that was anything but safe for a young girl, but on top of that she was raised by a single mother who was not around nearly enough. However the most formidable part of her upbringing was, she was sexually abused by ‘family friends’ and relatives on multiple occasions starting from the age of just nine. At twelve she was sent away to middle Tennessee to live with her father, there she realised her passion, she began giving speeches in front of her church and ultimately came to the conclusion that she wanted to speak for a living. Without her parents divorce Winfrey might have never figured out her passion of speaking to people until it was too late, this was a hidden advantage in the making of her success. However all too soon she had to leave the comfort of her father’s home where she could pursue her interest and journey back to her mother, where she was sadly yet again
Still attending college Oprah got offered a job as a co-anchor on the CBS television station. She thought that having a job and going to college could intervene with her college education, so she confined in her speech communications teacher, he told her “that it may be the ultimate step to launch her career” (Imbd 33). Oprah stuck with this job till the end of her college career. She wanted to reach out to somewhere other than Nashville. In 1976 Oprah took a risk and moved to Baltimore. She eventually found a job in 1978, and became a cohost of the station’s “people are talking” talk show.
Despite a difficult childhood, a traumatic teenhood, and an overall unfortunate life as a minority, Oprah Winfrey became and is currently the richest black woman in the United States with a story that has inspired the lives of millions. Oprah Winfrey’s story is truly the meaning of the phrase, “It doesn't matter where you are coming from, all that matters is where you are going.” The adversities Oprah faced made her into the generous, strong woman she is today that chooses to put her currencies towards worthy causes. Regardless of all the hardship Oprah faced in her early years of life, she still managed to pave her way to a life of fame and fortune.
In 1976 she moved to Baltimore and later hosts the T.V chat show people are talking. In 1984, Oprah relocates to chicago to host her own morning show “ AM Chicago”, which was renamed the “The Oprah Show”. In 1985 she makes film debut in Steven Spielberg's “The Color Purple” for which she was nominated for an academy award for best supporting actress. In 1986, OPrah launches the “The Oprah Winfrey Show” as a nationally syndicated program placed on 120 programs. In 1988, she had established harpo productions. In 1989, Winfrey stars in the ABC TV miniseries “The Women Of Brewster Place”. In 1994, president Clinton signs the “Oprah Bill”, creating a nationwide database of convicted child abusers. In 1998, Oprah received her seventh emmy as outstanding talk show host and the ninth emmy for the “The Oprah Winfrey Show”. In 2000, a company launches O, the oprah magazine which is created as being the most successful magazine launch in recent history. In 2003 Oprah's Book Club becomes the largest book club in the world and she receives the association of American publishes, AAP honors award. In 2005, she ranked number one on Forbes power celebrity list. In 2009, Oprah interviews Whitney Houston. In 2010, “The Oprah Winfrey Show” begins its 25th and final
As a public figure, Oprah’s influence is reached in many places around the world. Connected to her audience as well as her peers, she interacts with people of all walks of life. Oprah is recognized as a brilliant business woman, a compassionate television host, a accomplished actress, producer, publisher, educator, and a compassionate spokesperson for social causes. Her name and reputation warrant a great deal of respect. In Oprah’s biographical history,
After a few years, Winfrey’s mother traveled to Milwaukee for a job opportunity as a maid. She left Winfrey under the sole supervision of her grandma, Hattie May Lee. Winfrey later said, “I am what I am today because of my grandmother; my strength, my sense of reasoning, everything” (Weston 14).