Oprah Winfrey's historical context (rough draft)

With the backlash of World War II, the Cold War, Korean War and talk of atomic bombs and delivery systems, the period 1950's to 1970's in U.S. history is seen as a period of active foreign policy providing the United States with international power. On the domestic front, economy was booming, conservatism was sweeping the nation, education was increasing and the status of African-Americans was drastically changing. American culture flourished and radical ideas of the 1960's were mainstreamed in American life. However, the status of African Americans during this period challenged the "radical" ideas of white America. African-Americans were still treated differently and continued to witness racism throughout the nation.
When looking at the status of African Americans during these years, the 1950's thru the 1970's proved to be bittersweet years to raise an African-American child. Born on the same year that segregation was deemed illegal in the United States (Brown vs. Board of Education), and in the same decade that lynching occurred and voting discrimination remained widespread, Oprah Winfrey grew up in the middle of very pivotal years in African-American history. The Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement set the historical context in which Oprah grew up in.
Jim Crow laws, enacted in the Southern states, mandated "separate but equal" status for African Americans. The most important laws required that public schools, public places and public transportation, like trains and buses, have separate facilities for whites and blacks. During the Jim Crow era, Mississippi (the second state to secede from the Union in 1861) was one of the hardest states to live in for African Americans. Like most black families in Mississippi in the mid 1950's, Oprah also lived in rural poverty, a victim of Jim Crow laws. Racism was at its peak, leaving many African-Americans hopeless and scared for their lives. A series of increasingly racial segregation laws during the 1940's resulted in emigration of thousands of African-Americans throughout the 50's. In the late 1950's to the late 1960's, the South became a focus of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Civil Rights movement (1955-1968) aimed at abolishing racial discrimination of African-Americans. As a reactionary and non violent movement against Jim Crow laws, the movement challenged the social and political aspects of white America . Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and many other great African American figures were fighting for the advancement and equality of African-Americans. A mass mobilization of blacks organized "sit-ins", marches and community based events to show America the severity and inhumane treatment of African-Americans. The Civil Rights movement challenged the morality of mainstream America , turning the once powerful nation into a vulnerable one.
By the late 1960's, the Civil Rights Movement became the Black Power Movement (also known as the Black Arts Movement). Black power was a political movement that strove to express racial consciousness in America. Partly led by Malcolm X, the movement sought to economically improve African-American communities rather than integrate them. The search for a black identity led African-Americans to search for their past and reconnect with their African roots while expressing a sense of cultural nationalism. Era of the Black Panthers, the afro, the dashiki and the hip lingo, the late 1960's reflected the Black Experience. When the Black Panther Party began to grow, it became the largest Black organization advocating Black Power. Eventually due to the continual condemnation of the theory of Black Power as an anti-white movement and its involvement with the FBI, along with the destruction of the Black Panthers in the early 70s, the Black Power Concept seemed to disappear.
Oprah experienced first hand the injustices of the South’s discriminatory laws. She witnessed the black community’s struggle to prove itself as she endlessly fought to prove herself and internalize the black struggle. In the late twentieth century Oprah’s success shined in the midst of other great African-Americans. Blacks continued to rise in politics (Colin Powell), literature (Toni Morrison) and television ( Halle Berry and Denzel Washington).