8 Black Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Being Unhoused - Page 3

3. Oprah Winfrey

The billionaire media mogul faced being without shelter very early in her life, at the age of fourteen, when she grew up in extreme poverty. Her financially unstable childhood led her to reflect in 2020, during the height of the pandemic, how difficult it would have been for her family to survive.

“My mother wouldn’t have been able to go to work,” Winfrey told PEOPLE in May 2020. “She was a domestic (maid), traveling on the bus from inner-city 9th Street Milwaukee to Fox Point in the suburbs. That would not have been happening. We would have been doing what we could to find food.”

“There wasn’t health insurance,” she continued. “Not only did we not have insurance, every time the insurance man came to the door my mom told to me tell him she wasn’t at home. You tried not to get sick because if you got sick, it threw everything off. And she had to decide, ‘Am I going to take my child to the doctor, or am I going to feed my child?’ So we would have been hungry.”