When President Joe Biden signed a bill Thursday making Juneteenth a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States, there was one woman in the room who captured well-deserved attention.
Opal Lee was called the “grandmother of the movement” to make Juneteenth a federal holiday by Biden, who at one point left the stage and walked over to the 94-year-old to speak with her directly.
And Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black vice president, also gave Lee her due in her remarks, saying, “And looking out across this room, I see the advocates, the activists, the leaders, who have been calling for this day for so long, including the one and only Ms. Opal Lee.
In 2016, at 89 years old, Lee, a former teacher and lifelong activist, walked from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to the nation’s capital in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday.
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“My idea was to walk from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., and that surely somebody would notice a little old lady in tennis shoes,” Lee told ABC station KTRK-TV in Houston. “I left in September 2016, I got to Washington on January 10th, 2017.”
Four years later, Lee’s activism helped push Congress to establish a new national holiday for the first time in nearly 40 years. In 1983, lawmakers designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the third Monday in January to memorialize the assassinated civil rights leader.
Juneteenth — also known as Freedom Day, Liberation Day and Emancipation Day — is celebrated on June 19 to mark the day in 1865 when African American slaves in Galveston, Texas, were among the last to be told they had been freed — a full two-and-a-half years after the Emancipation Proclamation outlawed slavery in the Confederacy and two months after the Civil War officially ended.
“I knew I would see it happen in my lifetime,” she told NPR of the marking of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. “But I have to keep my cool.”
To this day, Lee walks two-and-a-half miles each year on June 19 to mark the time between the Emancipation Proclamation and when the news of freedom arrived in Galveston.
A Texas native, Lee said she experienced racial unrest firsthand during her childhood, including a night, on June 19, 1939, when a group of hundreds of rioters set fire to her family’s home.
“The people didn’t want us. They started gathering. The paper said the police couldn’t control the mob. My father came with a gun and police told them if he busted a cap they’d let the mob have us,” Lee told KTRK-TV. “They started throwing things at the house and when they left, they took out the furniture and burned it and burned the house.”
“People have said that perhaps this is the catalyst that got me onto Juneteenth, I don’t know that,” she said.
Advocates like Lee say it offers a day to reflect on slavery’s terrible stain on American history and for celebrations that look similar to those on the Fourth of July.
The federal government said most employees will be off Friday to mark the occasion, around which celebrations have become more mainstream in recent years, taking on added significance in 2020 when the country went through a racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd.
Lee said the federal holiday will be a day that people “all over the country” can cherish “as a day of unity.”
“I’ll be thinking of my ancestors,” she told NPR. “I’ll be thinking about my great-great-grandchildren and my grandchildren and my children.”
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