95-year-old Opal Lee talks about her journey to help make Juneteenth a national holiday
95-year-old Opal Lee who is know for Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., to demanding politicians to make Juneteenth a national holiday earning her the nickname “Grandmother of Juneteenth.”
“I decided that maybe if a little old lady, 89 years old, in tennis shoes walking from Fort Worth to Washington, somebody would pay attention,” Lee told CBS News talking about her decision to undertake the walk.
Lee would walk two and a half miles at a time, a reference to the two and a half years it took General Gordon Granger to arrive in Texas and inform enslaved Black people of their freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865.
Lee would later deliver 1.5 million signatures to Congress, and got the win when legislation passed in 2021. The bill was signed by President Biden in the White House, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday.
However, Juneteenth was loved by the former schoolteacher and mother of four way before she launched her national campaign. “When I was a little one and we lived in Marshall, Texas, we’d go to the fairground,” Lee said. “There’d be games and food and food and food. I’m here to tell ya it was like Christmas!”
However, June 19 wasn’t always a celebratory occasion for Lee. In 1939, when Lee was 12 years old, her family moved to a house in Fort Worth that was torched by a White mob according to CBS News.
“The paper says there was some 500 folk who gathered. They drug the furniture out and burned it, burned the house too. My parents never ever talked to us about it, not ever,” Lee said. “They accepted what happened.”
Although what too place, she said, her mother worked “untiringly” until she was able to get another home for the family. Lee credits her mother’s tenacity for her decision to erect a new national museum on her own land, which is dedicated to telling the story of Juneteenth.
“People think it’s a Black thing when it’s not. It’s not a Texas thing. It’s not that,” Lee said. “Juneteenth means freedom and I mean for everybody!”
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