The Obamas, Oprah featured on Time 100 list

VIDEO - High profile African-Americans who made the list include Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Usher and others...

Chris Witherspoon

Apr 21, 2011

Each year Time Magazine releases their annual Time 100 issue, listing the 100 most influential people in the world. The list is comprised of current leaders, innovators, artists, heroes and icons. Tomorrow, the news magazine will release their TIME 100 list for 2011.

High profile African-Americans who made the list include Barack Obama, Cory Booker, Geoffrey Canada, Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Lisa Jackson, Usher and others.

Several noteworthy names wrote about these black luminaries.

David M. Kennedy writes about Barack Obama: “Like FDR before him, Obama, 49, has looked beyond the near horizon. He has paid the political price of setting far-visioned initiatives on health care and financial reform ahead of short-term relief. And he has tried to persuade his countrymen to shed some of their youthful illusions: to forsake the frontiersman’s faith in unbridled individualism for a recognition of the complex interdependencies of modern life, to replace the rebel’s fear of government with the citizen’s trust that government of the people and by the people is for the people too, to stop assuming that Santa Claus will give us cheap energy forever and the Easter Bunny will pay our bills. Whatever the near term holds, history is likely to record that Obama set the country on the path to a future with fewer illusions.”

Oprah Winfrey to Corey Booker: “Cory Booker is a genius. I could sense it the first day I met him. His enormous intelligence is surpassed only by his heart. He is compassionate, committed, charismatic and generous of spirit. He defines servant leader…I believe Cory, 41, could have been elected Senator, but he chose the harder and arguably more important job of running New Jersey’s biggest and often most challenging city…He’s Newark’s biggest cheerleader now, but I’m looking forward to the day we all get to cheer him on wherever politically he chooses to go.”

WATCH OPRAH TALK ABOUT THE TIME 100 HERE