Opal Lee: Who is the ‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’ and how old is she?
For decades, Dr. Opal Lee campaigned for 19 June to be declared a national holiday. She was present when Joe Biden signed it into law.
Among the many well-known figures associated with Juneteenth, perhaps none has done as much for the cause and to ensure it became legally recognised as a federal holiday than Dr. Opal Lee. For decades, she tirelessly campaigned for 19 June to be declared a national holiday, celebrating the end of slavery in the United States. Her dream was finally realised on 17 June 2021 when President Joe Biden signed Bill S.475 into law and she was alongside him at the White House to witness the event in person.
Opal Lee’s early years
Opal Lee Flakes was born in Marshall, Texas on 7 October 1926 to Mattie and Otis Flakes. She was the eldest of three children - a couple of years older than her brother Otis Lee and four years older than her youngest brother Hugh Bernard. The Flakes family moved to Fort Worth, Texas in 1937 when Opal was 10 years old. Her parents bought a house - 940 East Annie Street, in a almost exclusively white neighbourhood on the southside. Just three days after they had moved into their new home, on 19 June 1939, it was razed to the ground - torched in a deliberate arson attack by a mob of several hundred racists. It would be a significant, pivotal moment in her life although one she has rarely talked about it publicly.
Opal was educated at Cooper Street Elementary School and graduated from I.M. Terrell High School - the city’s first black school, in 1943 (other notable alumni include musicians Ornette Coleman and King Curtis).
She graduated with a BA degree in elementary education from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas in 1953 and returned to Fort Worth where she would spend the next 15 years teaching at Amanda McCoy Elementary School. For the next nine years, she remained in teaching and worked as a home school counselor for Fort Worth Independent School District before taking early retirement in 1977.
Retirement gave Lee more time to dedicate to her local community. She was a founding member of Citizens Concerned with Human Dignity (CCHD) - an initiative set up to help the economically disadvantaged in finding housing in Fort Worth. Her other community work included setting up and managing a food bank which to this day is still up and running and caters for almost 500 families every week.
Opal’s walk
She was always heavily involved in civil rights and the preservation of local African American history and on 19 June 2016, aged 89, she decided “to do something” to draw attention to Juneteenth and make it a nationally recognized holiday. She set off on a 1400-mile walk from Fort Worth to Washington DC. “If an old lady’s walking from Fort Worth to Washington, somebody ought to take notice,” she explained. “And so, I started out doing two and a half miles to symbolize that in Texas, the enslaved didn’t know they were free until two and a half years after the emancipation. I left that church and walked two and a half miles, and the next day. I did several hundred miles before my team decided that wasn’t going to be the way I do it because somebody has promised us an RV (Recreational Vehicle) and they reneged, they decided what I was doing was too cotton-picking political. Political…!!”
But Lee continued with her annual walk well into her 90s, encouraging others to join her and collecting signatures for her petition along the way. Her initial goal was to reach 100,000 petition signatures, but by 2021, the figure stood at over 1.5 million.
Before President Biden signed Bill S.475 last year, 49 states had already recognized Juneteenth and a few months later in December 2021, Opal Lee was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) in recognition of her work as an educator and civil rights activist.
Today, at 95 years of age, Dr. Lee continues with her good work. This afternoon, hundreds of Texans joined her as she set off on her 2.5 mile walk through Fort Worth to celebrate the first Juneteeth as a federal holiday. She is also dedicated to realizing another of her dreams - the creation of a National Juneteenth Museum. Work on the 50,000-square-foot museum is already underway, right where it all began in Fort Worth’s historic southside and Dr.Lee hopes it will be inaugurated and open to the public on 19 June 2025.
She says she will continue campaigning for Juneteenth “because it means freedom. And we’re not free yet. We’ve got some disparities that need to be addressed. And first, we need to decide we are one body, one people. None of us are free until we are all free”.