As Oprah Winfrey ended her decades-old talk show this week, a grateful group of Morehouse College students and alumni paid homage to the Queen of Talk by paying it forward.
Recalling the academic leg up and second chance Oprah Winfrey’s full-ride scholarships gave them when they were striving and struggling students at the historically Black Atlanta institution, the “Sons of Oprah,” as they are known, announced this week that together they will pledge more than $300,000 of their own money to educate other deserving Morehouse men.
“We’re thrilled to be part of the historic moment, milestone in television history and Oprah’s life and in Morehouse College History,” Morehouse President Robert M. Franklin said in a television news interview after the “Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacular” event on Tuesday. The show featured more than 100 Morehouse students and alumni scholarship recipients who flooded the stage and streamed down the aisles of Chicago’s United Center bearing white candles.
As Oprah’s devotees and pundits ponder “the Oprah Effect” and recount her public largess — the cars, international trips and even homes she gave away — few knew about the several hundred young men whose education was made possible by the Oprah Winfrey Scholarship at the all-male Morehouse. When she launched the scholarship fund in 1990, Winfrey pledged then to educate 100 men at the school.
Today the number of students served has swelled to 415. When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of Morehouse’s most well-known alumni, attended the college in 1948, tuition was $90. Today, the annual tuition is about $22,000.
When Shaka Ameen Amir Rasheed, a 1993 graduate, received his scholarship, he was a struggling sophomore, working two summer jobs and waging a creative but unsuccessful letter-writing campaign to try to pay his way through Morehouse. Then, nothing short of a “miracle” happened: he was chosen as one of the inaugural Oprah Scholars.
“To be honest, I cried,” said Rasheed, who is now an attorney in New York. “That’s when I knew I could achieve my goal without worrying about survival and paying bills. It changed my life and the possibilities. I keep thinking that $1,400 almost kept me from staying at Morehouse. I want other alumni to know that little gifts matter, and big gifts help; that we can help provide a life-changing experience in young men’s lives.”
