The story of Opal Lee — the 89-year-old in tennis shoes who refused to let America forget
Most Americans who took June 19th off work in 2022, the first year Juneteenth was widely observed as a federal holiday, probably do not know the name, Opal Lee. They may have grilled food, attended a community festival, or simply enjoyed a long weekend. And while all of that is fine, the near-total erasure of the woman behind that holiday from mainstream public consciousness is exactly the kind of thing that should make us uncomfortable. Because behind every federal holiday, there is almost always a political process. Behind this one, there was a 89-year-old Black woman in tennis shoes walking through America with a petition and a plan.
Opal Lee’s story does not begin with activism in the conventional sense. It begins with fire.
Born Into a Country That Was Already on Fire
Opal Lee was born on October 7, 1926, in Marshall, Texas, where she grew up learning about Juneteenth from the annual neighborhood celebrations around her. Her family moved to Fort Worth when she was 10. It was a new city, a new neighborhood and a new kind of hostility.
In 1939, 82 years before June 19th became a federal holiday, a white mob of 500 people surrounded the family’s home in Fort Worth and burned it to the ground. The date on the calendar when the mob came: June 19th. The same day the family was quietly celebrating Juneteenth. Although police arrived at the scene, they were unable or unwilling to keep the rioters from destroying everything the family owned.
She was 12 years old.
While being interviewed decades later for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Lee said: “The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival.” That sentence, quiet and plain, contains everything you need to understand what drove the next eight decades of her life. She didn’t just lose a house on Juneteenth. She watched the America that Juneteenth was supposed to celebrate burn that house down. The irony was not lost on her. It never was.
The Years Nobody Talks About
Before she became the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” Lee was a teacher, a school counselor, and a quiet but tireless community organizer. After a career as an educator and home school counselor, Lee retired in 1976 and became active in community causes in the Fort Worth area, organizing the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration and co-founding the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society.
These decades, the 1970s, 80s, 90s, tend to get skipped in the telling of her story, because the world wasn’t paying attention yet. But this is where the real work happened. In the 1980s she became involved with a local food bank, which expanded under her leadership and led her to start Opal’s Farm. Using land donated by the local government, she planted fields of watermelon, tomatoes, potatoes, and greens to provide fresh food to food banks, hiring workers who were formerly incarcerated and couldn’t find other employment.
She was also a founding member of Citizens Concerned with Human Dignity, which assists individuals in finding affordable housing in Fort Worth, and her volunteer work with Habitat for Humanity eventually led to a seat on their Land Acquisition Board. She was also involved in a project converting a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into a center for arts and community healing.
None of this made national headlines. None of it was supposed to. It was the work of someone who had decided, somewhere between the ashes of 1939 and the quiet rhythms of community organizing, that the way you fight a country that burns your house down is by building things, slowly, stubbornly, and without waiting for applause.
The Walk That Changed Everything
By 2016, Opal Lee was 89 years old. Most people her age are done fighting. Lee was just getting started on the part that history would remember.
She gained national attention in 2016 when, at 89, she began a 1,400-mile trek from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., petitioning for the recognition of Juneteenth as a national holiday. The walks were symbolic and specific: she walked 2.5 miles in cities across the country to symbolize the 2.5 years it took for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas and free the enslaved.
“I was thinking that surely, somebody would see a little old lady in tennis shoes trying to get to Congress and notice,” Lee told NPR. It is a characteristically self-deprecating way of describing what was, in practice, a sophisticated piece of public advocacy, one that used symbolism, movement, and storytelling in ways that press conferences never could. The 2.5-mile walk wasn’t just exercise. It was a living monument to delayed freedom, repeated in city after city across America.
In 2019, she further amplified her advocacy with an online petition that garnered over 1.6 million signatures in support of national holiday recognition. The signatures went to Congress. Congress, for the most part, continued to do what Congress does, which is not much, until it suddenly does everything at once.
The Moment It Happened
On June 17, 2021, 154 years after Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved people of their delayed freedom, Lee witnessed President Joe Biden sign the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, officially establishing June 19 as a national holiday. She was 94 years old. She stood in the front row. Biden got down on one knee to greet her.
On that day, she famously said, “Now we can celebrate freedom from the 19th of June to the 4th of July!” It is a line worth sitting with. Not just celebration, but expansion, a push to extend the frame of American freedom outward, to make it bigger, to insist that the story of emancipation belongs in the same breath as the story of independence.
“Over the course of decades, she’s made it her mission to see that this day came,” Biden said at the ceremony. “It was almost a singular mission.”
What Came After and What Was Returned
The recognition that followed was significant, if overdue. Lee was named 2021 Texan of the Year by the Dallas Morning News, became Fort Worth Inc.’s 2022 Person of the Year, and was nominated for the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize by 34 members of Congress. In May 2024, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
But perhaps the most powerful moment came off the ceremony stage entirely. The lot where her family’s home was burned to the ground in 1939 was ultimately gifted back to her by Trinity Habitat for Humanity, and HistoryMaker Homes and Texas Capital built her a new home there, for free, completing it just in time for Juneteenth. The land that a white mob took from a 12-year-old girl was returned to a 97-year-old woman who had spent her life making sure that date meant something to an entire country.
That is not a footnote. That is the whole story.
Why This Matters More Than It Seems
There is a version of Opal Lee’s story that gets told as inspiration content, the old woman who walked for a holiday, the perseverance, the happy ending. That version is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Because what Lee’s story actually reveals is something far more uncomfortable: a federal holiday that exists because one private citizen refused to stop asking for it, for decades, while the institutions that should have acted did nothing.
“What we’re trying to get people to understand is that Juneteenth is freedom,” Lee has said. “And I don’t mean just for Black people, or Texas people. It’s freedom for everybody.”
That universalist framing is deliberate. Lee understood, perhaps better than any politician who eventually voted for the holiday, that the story of a 12-year-old girl whose home was burned on June 19th is not a Black story that white America should feel sympathy toward. It is an American story that the whole country needs to reckon with. The fire that destroyed her home in 1939 was not an accident or an anomaly. It was a message. And for 82 years, she wrote back.
The holiday exists because she would not stop.
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References
Biography.com Editors. (2024). How activist Opal Lee helped make Juneteenth a federal holiday. A&E Networks. https://www.biography.com/activists/a44213763/opal-lee-juneteenth-activist
Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. (2024). Opal Lee. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Opal-Lee
Gonzalez, C. (2024). Opal Lee. National Women’s History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/opal-lee
National Juneteenth Museum. (n.d.). Ms. Opal Lee. https://nationaljuneteenthmuseum.org/ms-opal-lee
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center. (n.d.). Opal Lee: A social justice hero. https://freedomcenter.org/voice/opal-lee
Texas State Historical Association. (2023). People of TSHA: Opal Lee. https://www.tshaonline.org/about/people/opal-lee
Veasey, M. (2022, January 31). Congressman Veasey (TX-33) leads effort to nominate Fort Worth’s Ms. Opal Lee for Nobel Peace Prize. U.S. House of Representatives. https://veasey.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congressman-veasey-tx-33-leads-effort-to-nominate-fort-worths-ms-opal,