Thelma Harper (nee Crowley) is a fictional character, who originally appeared on the ongoing Mama's Family on The Carol Burnett Show, portrayed by actress Vicki Lawrence. The character of Thelma is a "feisty resigning matriarch of a midwestern family," set in the fictional town of Raytown. Thelma "rules the roost with an iron tongue and solves every problem with a can of Bud, a slab of meat loaf, a smack upside the head, and a healthy dose of the unvarnished truth."

Lawrence performed on the Carol Burnett Show for 11 seasons. In the seventh season, in 1973, the "Family" sketch was created, which debuted the "Mama" role. Four years after the Carol Burnett show ended, a TV movie special titled "Eunice" (the character of Thelma's daughter) was broadcast including the key characters of the The Family sketches including Mama and was a great success.Mama's Family was then spun off as a separate sitcom based on the Thelma character in 1983. In syndication, the show and Thelma role continued into 1990.

Vicki Lawrence (born Vicki Ann Axelrad, March 26, 1949, Inglewood, California) is an American actress, comedienne, and Billboard Hot 100 #1 singer, who was frequently a game show panelist in the 1970s and 1980s. She is best known for her co-starring role on The Carol Burnett Show, alongside Carol Burnett, from 1967 to 1978, and as the sharp-tongued matriarch, Thelma Harper (the main character on Mama's Family, airing from 1983 to 1990, which was spun off from The Carol Burnett Show's The Family sketches). As a singer she recorded The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia that made #1 on the US chart as well as in Canada. She is credited with co-authoring two books and has also used the name Vicki Lawrence Schultz.

Lawrence was born in Inglewood, California, the daughter of Anne Alene (née Loyd) and Howard Axelrad, a certified public accountant. She is a graduate of Morningside High School in Inglewood. She was valedictorian of her class of 1967.

As a comedienne and actress, Lawrence is known for her work on The Carol Burnett Show, of which she was a part from 1967 to 1978. She was the only cast member, except for Burnett herself, who stayed on the show for the entire eleven seasons. Lawrence was hired for the show on the basis of a letter she sent to Burnett and the producers, with a photograph of Lawrence that showed her resemblance to Burnett.

Dana Elaine Owens (born March 18, 1970), better known by her stage name Queen Latifah, is an American singer, rapper, and actress. Her work in music, film and television has earned her a Golden Globe award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Image Awards, a Grammy Award, six additional Grammy nominations, an Emmy Award nomination and an Academy Award nomination.

Latifah was born, and primarily raised, in East Orange, New Jersey. She is the daughter of Rita (née Bray), a teacher at Irvington High School (her daughter's alma mater), and Lancelot Owens, Sr., a police officer, her parents divorced when Latifah was ten. Latifah was raised in the Baptist church and attended Catholic school in Newark, New Jersey. Her stage name, Latifah (لطيفة laţīfa), meaning "delicate" and "very kind" in Arabic, she found in an Islamic book of names when she was eight. Always a tall girl, the 5'10" Latifah was a power forward on her high school basketball team. She performed the number "Home" from the musical The Wiz in a high school play. She is of African American and Native American ancestry.

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.