photo credit: Joe Seer // Shutterstock
On Sunday night, NBC hosted the 2018 Golden Globes, awarding the greatness of those in television and movies from the past year. Attendees wore all black as a symbol to stand against sexual harassment.
Amongst those awarded was Oprah Winfrey and Sterling K Brown who were the first black actors in their categories to win. Sterling being the first black man to win “Best Actor in a TV series Drama” for his role as Randall Pearson in the hit NBC show “This Is Us.”
“I’ve never been the first brother to do anything,” he said when accepting his award. “I was the fourth black student council president, was the fourth JV captain to my basketball team. Finally, to be the first of something is really interesting because I never considered myself to be a trailblazer. I just try to stay in my truth all the time. If I come from a place of truth, that’s all I can do.”
The one and only Oprah Winfrey was the first black woman to win the Cecil B. DeMille Award. Oprah’s extraordinary speech has social media praising her, and ready to be her backbone if she ever decided to run for President in 2020.
In Oprah’s speech, geared towards the “Me Too” movement, she stated, “I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farmworkers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine and science. They’re part of the world of tech and in politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.”
She told the story of Recy Taylor, a young woman and mother who was “abducted by six armed white men, raped and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church.” She continued explaining how “justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her [Recy Taylor] were never persecuted.” “And for too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dared speak their truth to the power of those men. But their time is up.”
Check out the full speech below:
Written by Clarke Jones