FORT WORTH, Texas — This year’s Juneteenth celebration was extra sweet after President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth Bill on June 17, making it a federal holiday.
Since 2016 Fort Worth native Opal Lee has led Opal’s Walk for Juneteenth with the goal to make it a national holiday. In recent years dozens have joined in the walk, but this year, the event drew a crowd of hundreds who marched behind Lee from Evans Avenue Plaza to the Tarrant County Courthouse in downtown Fort Worth.
At 94 years old Lee’s activism stems from a passion to preserve our country's history about the day enslaved African Americans in Texas learned of slavery’s abolition 2.5 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Juneteenth celebrates June 19, 1865, when Union Army Major General Gordon Granger spoke in Galveston, Texas, and issued the order declaring “all slaves are free.” Texas was the last state in the Confederacy to fall.
Now 156 years later, the date of Granger’s declaration is now a federal holiday, and according to Biden, Lee is largely responsible.
“Over the course of decades, she's made it her mission to see that this day came,” said President Joe Biden at the June 17th bill signing ceremony in the White House “She’s walked for miles and miles, literally and figuratively, to bring attention to Juneteenth.”
At the ceremony Lee received a standing ovation at Biden’s request. Before the bill was signed, the president shared Opal's story of how a racial hate crime impacted her journey.
“As a child growing up in Texas, she and her family would celebrate Juneteenth... Juneteenth 1939, when she was 12 years old a white mob torched her family home, but such hate never stopped her,” said President Biden.
In Fort Worth, she dedicated more than four decades to coordinating the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration. She’s the oldest living board member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation and helped pave the way for 43 states establishing Juneteenth as a day of observance.
At this year’s walk, two helicopters circled the large crowd and a film crew recorded as hundreds of attendees chanted Lee’s name.
Lee said this was a goal she wanted to see accomplished before she died and feels blessed to see the day become a reality.
“It feels really, really good,” said Lee while taking a break during the walk. “It feels good to know these are the people who helped us get to this point. It's not a little old lady in tennis shoes, it’s a whole lot of people in all kinds of shoes making this happen.”
When the crowd reached the courthouse, music led by The Fort Worth Opera introduced Lee’s first address on the federal holiday. Lee told the crowd now that she’s seen her dream come true, she’ll move on to other issues.
“We’re going to tackle schools not putting in the right things in the books so that children will know our truth. We’re going to tackle healthcare, and we’re going to tackle climate change, you hope I live that long!”
Lee says she plans to walk again next year and will work to make change in the future for as long as she’s able, one step at a time.
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