Oprah Winfrey was born into poverty by a teenage single mother in 1954 in Kosciusko, Mississippi. For the earliest years of her life she was raised by her maternal grandmother, and under her kind-hearted discipline was taught to read by the age of two and speak exceptionally by the age of three. When Winfrey was six years old, she was sent to live with her mother in Wisconsin. She was submerged into inner-city Milwaukee, and faced the hardships of growing up in the urban ghetto. Her mother had many problems of her own and was so consumed by them that she was unable to give attention to her daughter. This had many adverse consequences, and left Winfrey vulnerable to multiple counts of sexual abuse at an early age, including by her mother's boyfriend, a teenage cousin, and a family friend. She also became pregnant at the age of 14, but her son died at infancy. As she got older, she struggled with racism and was discriminated against by her peers because of her economic status. The neglect and problems she encountered led Winfrey to develop an aggressive attitude, and eventually her mother could no longer deal with Winfrey's delinquency and so she sent her to live with her father in Nashville, Tennessee.
With his strict disciplinary mechanisms and value for education, Winfrey's father helped her turn her life around. She became an honor student and at the age of 17 began her broadcasting career on the radio station WVOL. She earned a scholarship to Tennessee State University and studied drama and speech. At the age of 19 she landed an anchor position for WTVF-TV, Nashville's CBS affiliate. Here she was the first African-American and the youngest person to ever be an anchor on the network. Not too late afterwards in 1976 she moved to Boston to take on a position as co-anchor for WJZ-TV evening news. However, it was hard for her to contain her emotions on many of her stories, and her attachment to the subject matter made