From a Fort Worth mob scene to the White House: how Opal Lee pushed for Juneteenth

Opal Lee, the Fort Worth educator known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” is approaching her 100th birthday this year after a decades-long campaign that turned June 19 into a national holiday.

Her story — chronicled in Bud Kennedy’s Fort Worth Star-Telegram columns over 11 years — traces a path from a violent 1939 attack on her family’s home to a White House signing ceremony in 2021:

• In 1939, when she was 12-year-old Opal Flake, a white crowd estimated at 500 people stormed her family’s home at East Annie Street and New York Avenue in Fort Worth on Juneteenth. They destroyed furniture and damaged the building while police remained “not mobilized,” according to a 2015 Kennedy column. The story, which Lee herself had mostly kept secret for 77 years, eventually lifted her to fame as she lobbied for a national Juneteenth holiday.
• Lee had campaigned for a Juneteenth holiday since 2009, when she walked 2 miles in Washington to watch President Barack Obama’s inauguration and presented him a letter asking for the holiday, as covered in a Kennedy column and a video by former Star-Telegram videographer Rodger Mallison.
• At 90, Lee completed a four-month “Walk to D.C.” leading events in cities from Texas to North Carolina to push for the federal Juneteenth holiday. It was capped by a Capitol Hill news conference and a 2-mile walk from Frederick Douglass’ historic home, per a 2017 Star-Telegram column.
• In D.C., Lee said she was struck by how little the new National Museum of African American History and Culture said about Juneteenth. She told Kennedy, “It’s a unifier for America. Slaves didn’t free themselves,” in his account of her return from Washington.
• At 93, she opened up more and began retelling the story of the 1939 attack. She described how the mob gathered for three days throwing rocks, then “tore the house all up, then they set it on fire” after police warned her father, railroad worker Otis Flake, not to shoot, in a June 2020 column.
• That year, instead of a traditional Juneteenth festival, Lee led a more than 2-mile walk from downtown Fort Worth to Will Rogers Coliseum, telling the crowd, “This is not a Black thing, or a white thing — it’s a racism thing,” as Kennedy reported.
• Newly digitized archives revealed more of the history. Charles Stowe, a 65-year-old publisher of “Stowe’s Chronicle” and night watchman at First Baptist Church under Ku Klux Klan-friendly pastor J. Frank Norris, had exchanged 12 gunshots with East Hattie Street residents in 1939 a month before the Flake home was attacked, while flyers signed by the “Anglo-Saxon Committee” warned Black homebuyers away, in a 2021 column.
• In 2021, President Joe Biden knelt before Lee, then 94, in the White House before signing Juneteenth into law as a federal holiday, telling her, “But such hate never stopped her any more than it stopped the vast majority of you,” Kennedy wrote.
• At 96, Lee — who once taught third grade at Amanda McCoy and Dunbar elementary schools for $2,000 a year — was still barnstorming the nation, accepting an honorary doctorate from her alma mater Wiley College and raising capital to build a national Juneteenth museum in Fort Worth, according to a 2023 column.

The summary points above were compiled with the help of AI tools and edited by journalists. The source reporting referenced above was written and edited entirely by journalists.