Top 10 Oprah Moments

Two decades after the Civil Rights Act, residents of Forsyth County, Ga. still had a reputation for wanting to keep African-Americans out: as of 1987, not a single black person had reportedly lived there in 75 years. Oprah traveled to the county, outside Atlanta, to find out why. At a town hall meeting she called "to hear from the citizens themselves," she met a man identified on her show only as Dennis. "I'm afraid of them coming to Forsyth County," he admitted, explaining that his Atlanta neighborhood had turned into a "rat-infested slum" after the first African-Americans were bused to the local high school. He also used the N-word repeatedly, going so far as to delineate the difference between the epithet and a black person. For her 20th Anniversary Follow-Up show in 2006, Oprah put Dennis back on air to explain himself. "I've never been a racist," he insisted, adding that he had received threats after the original Oprah segment and had since excised the N-word from his vocabulary. "I spoke from what I had lived," he added. "And that's all anybody can do."

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