Fort Worth’s Opal Lee: ‘If we’ve been taught to hate, we can be taught to love’ | Opinion
In a time of heartbreak and sorrow, the voice of a 94-year-old can lift our spirits.
“If we’ve been taught to hate, we can be taught to love,” Opal Lee said the other day, her voice booming over the breakfast crowd filling a Fort Worth hotel ballroom.
Last week was one of our saddest. We lost 215 Tarrant County friends and neighbors to COVID-19, including a congressman. A grisly crash took six more lives and injured more than 50 people, including healthcare workers, police officers and county deputies.
But we also have the hope for a better future that Lee showed us Feb. 5, when she gave a phenomenal stemwinder of a speech that blew everybody’s hair back at the local tourism leaders’ annual meeting.
“Let me tell you my dream or my wish for my community, for Fort Worth,” she told the rapt audience.
“Hear me please — each one of us, everybody teach one of us how to love. It’s that simple.”
If you’re not familiar with Opal Lee, let me explain.
She’s a tough-as-nails retired school counselor who wages determined campaigns for literacy, social needs, Black history and in particular, to make Juneteenth a national holiday.
June 19 is not just the day when all Texans finally achieved liberty, with the freeing of slaves at the close of the Civil War.
It was also the day white people destroyed her childhood home.
She doesn’t talk about this often. But on Juneteenth 1939, when Lee was 12, a white mob stoned and then smashed her family’s home on East Annie Street because that was a white neighborhood.
Fourteen police, sheriff’s and state trooper units were on hand. Yet officers only watched.
More than 80 years later, Lee is a powerful force for good in her Riverside neighborhood and her city. She has gained recognition throughout the nation as the little Fort Worth activist who staged a 2016 “walk to D.C.” to promote celebrating Juneteenth.
Visit Fort Worth, the tourism agency, gave her the Hospitality Award for promoting Black history and historical sites, including the Stewart Street home where Martin Luther King Jr. stayed on a 1959 visit.
She talked about how everyone can teach love to the person “that we know needs that lesson” to change minds from hateful attitudes toward those of other races.
“Of course, if you’re the culprit,” she said, “come see me.
“Now, this won’t happen overnight. You’ll have to get out of your comfort zone.”
She dreams of a Black history museum in the old Guinn school at East Rosedale Street and Interstate 35W, she said, preferably with an original brick outbuilding restored the way it was before highway work demolished it.
She’s also on a committee that hopes to acquire the former city Ku Klux Klan hall, 1012 N. Main St., and turn it into an arts and cultural center.
“Please don’t let me have to ask Mark Cuban or the Ford Foundation for money for these projects when the money is right here on my doorstep,” she said.
“Will you ask the Basses and Mrs. [Alice] Walton and the Rainwater Foundation and the acres of foundations in town to weigh in on what would put Fort Worth in league with dozens of other cities that have attractions of this magnitude?”
It’s tough to say no to Opal Lee.
This story was originally published February 13, 2021 at 3:44 PM with the headline "Fort Worth’s Opal Lee: ‘If we’ve been taught to hate, we can be taught to love’ | Opinion."
