Crystal Wise/Fort Worth Magazine
Opal Lee
Perhaps no one ever in Fort Worth — maybe all of America — has bookends on the journey of life quite like the immeasurable Opal Lee, a titan of 21st century civil rights, better known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth. Consider: As a 12-year-old girl, Opal watched as a White mob burned down her family’s home on Annie Street. At 95, she was the guest of the White House, a witness to an act of history that she worked so tirelessly to see happen.
The man who led that mob isn’t but a lonely gravesite somewhere. His last remaining victim has carved out a place for herself in American history.
“She’s been fighting for what’s right all of her life,” says Frederick Gooding, an associate professor of African American history in the John D. Roach Honors College at TCU, as well as a Ronald E. Moore Professor of Humanities. “All of her life she has had to deal with trauma. Think about it. The home is the bedrock of building wealth in this country, and someone burns down your home. That’s a traumatic event. And for hundreds of people to say we don’t want you in this neighborhood. All [her father] was trying to do was live the American dream just like everyone else.
“But to take that trauma and turn it into triumph, to never stop walking the path, and this never-say-die spirit. She never let go of a vision of reconciliation, truth, and justice. She’s never let go of that. In many ways, she represents, for me, the quintessential American.”
Opal, Fort Worth Inc.’s 2022 Person of the Year, an honor bestowed on an individual who has demonstrated a significant contribution to making Greater Fort Worth a better place to live and work with emphasis placed on their contributions over the past year, awaits the decision of the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
Late last year, a Congressional delegation, led by Fort Worth Democrat Marc Veasey, recognized Opal for a dedication to the cause of civil rights and racial equality by nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize, the ultimate recognition from the international community. Her competition is steep, make no mistake about it. Favorites to win include Belarusian opposition politician Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Pope Francis, Tuvalu foreign minister Simon Kofe, and Alexey Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, among others.
Opal’s decades-long campaign for Juneteenth to be recognized as a federal holiday became reality in June 2021 when President Joe Biden, with Opal in attendance, signed the bill making Juneteenth the 11th federal holiday to be celebrated every June 19 forever on.
“We’re blessed to mark the day in the presence of Ms. Opal Lee,” Biden said that day. “You’re incredible. A daughter of Texas. You are an incredible woman, you really are. Hate never stopped her. Over the course of decades, she has made it her mission to see that this day came.”
Said Veasey, a Fort Worth native, on the floor of the U.S. House: “I have been proud to call Ms. Lee a friend and mentor for nearly my whole life and was honored to work alongside her to finally get Juneteenth made into a national holiday last year. I cannot think of a better person who has constantly fought for justice, and that is why I am nominating her to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.”
Juneteenth is the commemoration of the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas learned they were free through Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation 2 1/2 years earlier. But, Opal has argued, Juneteenth is not simply just a holiday for African Americans, but all those Americans who labored to abolish slavery and those in the white community who took up the struggle, at great personal risk, for equality in the Jim Crow 20th century.
Visit Fort Worth
Opal Lee
Opal Lee speaks at the 2021 Visit Fort Worth Annual Meeting.
Also, this past year, she published a children’s book titled Juneteenth, dedicated, she said, to all the children of the U.S. who need to be made aware of their history. As important was news that Fort Worth would be home to a to-be-constructed National Juneteenth Museum in the Historic Southside. When she was at the White House, Biden wrote her a check for $6.19, which is part of the campaign to raise funds for the museum. All who want to contribute can make a check out for $6.19 or $60.19 or $600.19. Or whatever resembles 6/19.
What was said between her and Biden at the White House she is keeping to herself. “I’m not telling anybody what the president said. He was delightful. It was humbling. I was delighted. I tell people I wanted to do a holy dance.”
Biden was the third president Opal has met. She met Lyndon B. Johnson during his administration and Barack Obama during his.
There is much more to know about Opal Lee than her walk across America to raise awareness for Juneteenth, all the while gathering 1.5 million signatures, in her 89th year. She since had gathered 1.5 million more signatures, a total of 3 million, she says, when the White House called her last year with an invitation.
She is a gracious host and loves to laugh and enjoys a joke. While posing for photos for this story, she invited me to come closer to her on her porch.
“You see that?” she asks, pointing to a place underneath an awning at her house that is in need of repair. “That’s on my list.”
At almost 96 — her birthday is Friday — Opal still has dreams, and they’re all on this list she has mentioned three or four times. It’s a list as long as a child’s at Christmastime, she says. None of them, other than perhaps the fix on her home, has anything to do with her.
Opal has some property around town that she wants to make housing for homeless, including a trailer in her own backyard that she used as a storage shed. She cleaned it out and envisions making it into two living quarters. She has two other lots that she wants to do the same, except she is intrigued by the idea of the shipping containers that builders are using to make homes. In Texarkana, she owns a property that used to be in her family. She wants to make a park of that.
Opal has thought about the prize that comes with winning the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s about $1 million. All of those projects for the homeless have a place in the would-be proceeds.
Less known as well about Opal is the work she does quietly from her home. Not far from her house is Opal’s Farm, where produce is distributed to the hungry through food banks, including the one she started at her church, Baker Chapel AME Church, which she has been a member of since 1937, two years before the attack on her family’s home.
An old Jax Beer building, she says, was empty and available behind her home. The lease agreement was for $4,000 a month.
“Where are we going to get that?” she remembers asking. “We paid it for 11 months. The month we didn’t have it, those people [the landlords] came to us and said it looked like we were doing good work here and gave us that $1.3 million building.”
That food bank services 500 people a day, she says, adding that she has been retired from the food bank for several years.
This is not the story, obviously, of someone left angry by childhood trauma. There are so many stories of that, people psychologically scarred in adulthood until the day they take their last breath.
Not Opal.
“I didn’t have time to be angry,” she says. “I finished high school at 16. My mom had wanted me to go back to Marshall [Texas, where the family was from] to go to school at Wiley College. I got married instead. My mother wouldn’t even go to the wedding. It took me four years and four babies to realize I was going to have to raise that husband too. I cut my losses.”
Opal returned home and asked her mother if her offer to go to Wiley was still good. There was no longer any money to go to school. Opal went off to Marshall, however.
“I worked I don’t know how many jobs to go to college,” she says. “I went to Wiley without a dime. Mind you, they put me to work in the college bookstore. And my mother kept the job I had during the week. She would work my job in Fort Worth during the week, and I would come home and work on the weekend. I got done [with a degree] in 3 1/2 years.”
Opal came back to Fort Worth and took a job teaching. Her salary was $2,000 a year, relative pennies even in the early 1950s when you have four kids to feed. In addition to her job with the school, Opal took another with Convair, the bomber plant in Fort Worth that would eventually become Lockheed Martin. She taught school all day and clocked in at Convair at 4 p.m. and clocked out at midnight.
And it’s clear that at 95, Opal maintains that same ethos even with her life’s work as the Grandmother of Juneteenth complete. In March, she signed with a talent agency in Los Angeles, Creative Artists Agency, according to Variety. From the platforms Opal is put on, she will tell the story of Juneteenth and the world she has seen evolve in her almost 100 years.
She says she generally makes two to three appearances a month to speak, and many of those are at schools, the place and audience she knows as well as any other as a former teacher.
Gooding, the professor at TCU, says time will tell about Opal’s place in American history, though there is no questioning her impact.
“She has indisputably played a pivotal role in heightening awareness around the federal holiday we now call Juneteenth,” Gooding says. “I think regionally, she needs to be at the top of a short list. As far as national impact, how people respond to Juneteenth as a holiday might add to her legacy.”
While I think of her place in history, Opal hasn’t given it any thought, she says, for the same reasons she never dwelt on the tragedy of her childhood.
The truth is, Opal Lee isn’t yet in the past. She lives to make a difference in the present and thinks about the future. Even at 95.
“I keep telling them, I’m just a little old lady in tennis shoes getting in everybody else’s business,” Opal says. “And having a damn good time doing it.”
