"Your crown has been paid for. Put it on your head and wear it," Oprah Winfrey told the cheering Spelman College Class of 2012, dedicating the day not just to the new graduates but to their ancestors' sacrifices.

The crown was "paid for not just by you and your four years, but by the blood of the lynchings, the tears and the sweat and the trials and the tears and the sorrows," said Winfrey, and "the sit-ins and the setbacks."

You come here trailing the breath of the ancestors," she intoned several times to some 550 new graduates of the historically African-American womens' college.