At 98, the Grandmother of Juneteenth Still Has Work to Do

The modest houses look like those one might see lining middle-class neighborhoods in any American city. Lawns fade from lush green to light brown. Signs dot the yards: local ballot measures or county commissioner races. At the top of the block, on East Annie Street in the Historic Southside neighborhood of Fort Worth, sits a house that looks well loved, its front yard surrounded by a wrought iron fence and lined with shrubbery. This is where Opal Lee’s childhood home once burned.

Her parents had worked hard to purchase the land and the house upon it. They had moved here from Marshall, in East Texas, her father hoping to find a steady job in the city during the Great Depression. Then, on the night of June 19, 1939, when Lee was twelve years old, a white mob gathered, demanding that the family leave. Lee and her brothers took refuge at a friend’s house a few blocks away while her parents fled under cover of darkness. The mob trashed the home and set it on fire.

Lee’s mom and dad never discussed what happened with their children, so some of the details of that night have been lost. But the date of the attack, Juneteenth, would become central to Lee’s life and legacy. She went on to become a teacher and raise four children, but upon retiring, she set her mind to making Juneteenth a federal holiday. In 2016, at age 89, she began walking in towns and cities from Fort Worth all the way to Washington, D.C., a trek that transformed her into a larger-than-life figure in the political and cultural landscape of America. She met with multiple presidents (and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2024), had glowing profiles written about her in such publications as The New York Times, and was nominated by more than thirty members of Congress for a Nobel Peace Prize. She became, in a way, a folk hero, someone whose story, specifically the story of her long walk, traveled like a folktale. She became known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth.

In 2021 she stood beside President Joe Biden in the East Room of the White House as he signed the bill declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday. She had actually done the thing she’d set out to do. And so, some might suggest, the Grand Work of Ms. Opal Lee was finished. She’d taken an inciting moment of rage and grief and dedicated her life to healing the wound it had created. And yes, that is a mighty triumph. A worthy ending to a remarkable life, a strong conclusion—if she were to be satisfied with any idea of closure. But Lee, who has lived through, endured, and fought for so much in a long and still-unfurling lifetime, has something unique to offer in an era of renewed crisis.

Building a better world may feel impossible to those who might, in their haste to improve things or at the height of their frustration, want to take on the whole world at once. Lee’s life is a lesson in patience. The road is long, and you travel on it because the alternative is untenable, and you do whatever you can along the way, and you hope some people will maybe join you.

Lee now lives on the same property where her childhood home once sat, inside a house recently built for her by Habitat for Humanity. On the front door is a purple wreath. In the center of the wreath is a quote from Lee herself: “If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love.”

Inside, the house buzzes with Lee’s friends and family. There’s excitement in the air, in part because it is Veterans Day, and at least two veterans are in the home, preparing to circulate through several restaurants to take advantage of the specials. At least four conversations are happening at once, all of them somehow meeting at a center point, briefly, before bouncing off one another and continuing in their own universes.

When Lee emerges from a back room, glass of milk in hand, she is vibrant, smiling widely, and moving gingerly, but no one fusses over her. They all seem to know she moves at her own pace, on her own time. “Old people ain’t got nothing but time,” she tells me, settling into a chair in an office that is overflowing with honors and ephemera: a signed basketball from the New York Knicks, photos with Biden and President Barack Obama, various awards from women’s groups and colleges and civil rights organizations.

When I ask Lee how she’s feeling, she tells me she’s wearing a back brace, so she’s feeling good. Her back has been hurting, but it ain’t nothing special. Old people have aches and pains; most of them don’t even know why or where they came from. I want to know what keeps her going, and she smiles. “I feel like I’m everybody’s grandma. And I had good grandmas.” She recalls her grandparents always finding ways to help folks in their community. “My mom was like that too,” she says. “I remember a couple of sisters that needed a place to stay, and my mom gave them a place. It’s just part of your makeup.”

Lee, now 98 years old, doesn’t stay still often, not even while speaking. She’s often swinging her arms or shaking her head or twisting a bit in her chair. Her life has been, in many ways, defined by motion, by work, by the next task at hand. Nothing is too big of a deal that it can’t be overcome—ain’t no use in complaining when there’s forward progress to be made. “Everybody wants the old lady’s opinion,” she tells me before breaking into a laugh. “After a while, they’re gonna go, ‘Who was that old lady?’ ”

Lee’s childhood was, perhaps unsurprisingly, one of motion, labor, and a touch of mischief. Her grandparents lived on forty acres of land near Texarkana and another forty in Ben Lomond, a tiny Arkansas community thirty miles north. Lee’s not certain how they got the land, but she thinks her grandfather’s father—likely an enslaved man—passed the parcels down to his children.

Lee grew up in a bustling household; her mother had eighteen siblings, so there was always family around. Her mom was a chef for several wealthy families, and her dad worked as a custodian. Lee spent school years in Marshall, but in the summers her mother would send her and her two younger brothers to the land near Texarkana to work. “Out there, everybody had a job to do,” Lee tells me. “Mine was to take out the slop jars.” There was no indoor plumbing, and the outhouse was far from the home, so the family kept slop jars in every bedroom. “It was my responsibility to take them to the outhouse, empty them, wash them out . . . But I’d get them and get out there and take the handle and sling it just as far as I could.”

Her mother also made it a priority that Lee spend time reading. Lee says that she loved books until she discovered boys. But even then, she often camped out in the library, sometimes staying until she got kicked out at closing time. She was a good student, first in Marshall and then when her family moved to Fort Worth, where they stayed even after the mob attack. At sixteen, Lee graduated from I. M. Terrell High School, the first Black high school in the city, and then married Joe Roland, a classmate. They had four children before separating.

A single mother at 22, Lee decided she wanted to go to college. Her mom didn’t have money to help her out, but in typical Lee fashion, she simply worked until she earned enough herself. She was admitted to Wiley University, a historically Black college in Marshall. She kept her children in Fort Worth and did janitorial work in the city on weekends. During the week, her mom would help look after the kids while Lee attended classes and juggled two jobs, working at the college bookstore and tending a cousin’s house.

Lee studied education at Wiley, in part because it was the quickest way for her to graduate and get into the workforce. She landed a job teaching third grade at Fort Worth’s Amanda McCoy Elementary school and remained in the classroom for decades. (“I taught third grade so long I was beginning to act like the children,” she jokes.) But even then, she was always balancing multiple jobs. “If I was at school from eight o’clock to three o’clock, there’d be a car waiting for me. And from four o’clock to twelve o’clock, I worked at Lockheed Martin,” where she cleaned corporate offices. “I did that for a long time,” she tells me.

At one point, she enrolled at the University of North Texas to get a master’s in education. Going from eight in the morning until midnight, raising four children without their father around—it was an exhausting regimen. Lee never thought to complain. She insists that “God gives you the strength to do the things that you absolutely have to do,” which defines, I think, the stubborn determination at the root of her multi-layered origin story.

Lee retired from teaching when she was in her mid-sixties. As far as retirement goes, there are many ways to fill the time, or not fill the time, and I don’t think anyone would have blamed Lee for spending her days immersed in rest and relaxation. But, as she puts it, there was another job to do.

Lee was “knee-high to a duck” when she first celebrated Juneteenth, she tells me. Her family attended the local gathering in Marshall, a small community event centered on eating, games, and music. “We’d go to the fairground, and there’d be speeches and music and food and food and food and food.”

As time went on, though, Lee came to realize there was an opportunity to use the holiday for more: “We need to be able to help people,” she says. By the time she was in her fifties, she’d begun working with various community organizations to set up booths at the Fort Worth celebrations to help attendees land jobs or purchase homes. “So many things besides the music and the other things that we did. Juneteenth’s not just fun. Juneteenth has a purpose.”

Decades later, she realized she still wasn’t done with Juneteenth. “I’m old as dirt by that time,” she says. “I’ve retired and decided that if I walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., somebody would take notice.” A half-grin on her face, Lee recounts telling folks there was a specific somebody she had in mind. “I was going to Washington to talk to President Obama about making Juneteenth a holiday, and they all said, ‘By the time you get there, he’ll be out of office.’ ”

She walked two-and-a-half-mile stretches at a time, in various places across the country, to symbolize the two and a half years that passed between the time the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and U.S. Army General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to inform the enslaved people of Texas that they were actually free. She doesn’t remember how long her journey took, only how kind people were to her along the way. Soon after embarking, news cameras appeared.

I get the sense that Lee doesn’t enjoy centering herself as the Person Who Brought Juneteenth Into the National Consciousness. And of course, she didn’t get here alone. There is Al Edwards, for example. Edwards died in 2020, the year before Juneteenth was signed into law as a federal holiday. He served in the Texas House of Representatives from 1979 to 2007 and 2009 to 2011, authoring a bill to make Juneteenth a paid holiday in Texas, which became law his first year in the Legislature. For his efforts, Edwards was widely known as the Father of Juneteenth.

As for Lee’s motivation to promote the holiday? To hear her tell it, it was simple: Something needed to be done, so she did it. “I have always felt like Juneteenth needed to be nationally known,” she says, shrugging. “I think that in Texas we realize that it’s more than a festival, and I’m hoping others will too.”

Obama had indeed left office before Lee got the chance to bend his ear, so she began appealing to Congress, and when Biden took office, in 2020, she recognized a fresh opportunity. The photo in Lee’s office that stands out the most is an image of Biden presenting her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in May of last year. She’s grinning wide and leaning back into him while Biden, who towers over her, bends down and plants a kiss on her forehead. There’s another photo of her in the White House in which she looks over the newly signed law making Juneteenth a federal holiday, mouth wide open as if she cannot believe it. “Oh man, I could have done a holy dance. But the kids say when I try, I’m twerking, whatever the hell that is.” She waves a dismissive hand as I laugh.

There is a world where Lee’s story ends here, after Juneteenth is made a federal holiday, with her arriving back in Texas, basking in the glory of a Life’s Work fully realized. Thankfully, that world doesn’t exist.

There’s so much to do,” Lee says, rocking steadily back and forth in her office chair. She’s telling me about a dilemma that, she says, is giving her fits. “I’m having a hemorrhage right now because of my church.” The church, the one that she has faithfully attended for most of her life, owns a home that’s currently vacant. It’s a little run-down, but there are so many people in need of homes, so she’s determined to get someone into it. “I says, ‘I’ll do the electricity, and I’ll do the plumbing, if the rest of you at the church will do the foundation.’ ”

It’s a thing others might consider trivial, but she is worked up, passionate about getting someone, anyone, off the streets. She sermonizes on why it’s important for faith communities to help others, then smirks and says quietly, “They keep putting me off about that house, and I’m gonna keep worrying the hell outta them until they do something or put me out the church.”

Her status as a folk hero has grown in recent years. She has written a children’s book (Juneteenth: A Children’s Story, which was published in 2019 and reissued in 2022) and has had a children’s book written about her (Alice Faye Duncan’s Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free). But Lee remains hyperfocused on a series of smaller tasks. Juneteenth was a Project, but not the only one, and not even the biggest one. It is a part of a larger effort focused on education and caring for the youth, or the poor, or anyone struggling or suffering on the margins.

Not far from Annie Street is Lee’s farm, a three-acre plot with the downtown Fort Worth skyline hovering behind it. Lee started it with the help of the farm’s manager, Greg Joel. It delivers fresh produce to the Community Food Bank, helping serve five hundred families most days of the week. In many ways, it is the farm that defines this era of Lee’s life.

When Lee told me that “we need to be able to help people,” she was talking about her approach to growing Juneteenth beyond just a festival, but she has also braided that belief into the entirety of her living, her time on earth. She taught kids because she loved teaching, because she thought that her opportunity to reach others had to begin with our young people, at the front of a classroom, and then the classroom became everywhere. She is still, even now, a teacher, doling out lessons, sharing what she considers simple ideals. You see someone who needs help, you help them. Tidy up your corner of the world the best you can, and maybe someone else will see that and take their own actions, and if enough of us do that, at least some of the world becomes better.

She’s not without her anxieties. When I visit her, it is shortly after the 2024 presidential election, and I ask her what she makes of it. “Women have been doing things behind the scenes for so long, but to be out in front . . .” She looks outside for a moment. “But it didn’t happen. So we wait and see what happens another time.”

The best remedy for a fractured country, she insists, is strengthening communities. “We’ve lost something,” she says. “People live on the same block and don’t even know who their neighbors are. And I don’t think that’s fitting. You go to churches, and you don’t even know who the parishioners are. And I don’t know how to rectify that, but it certainly needs rectifying.”

Lee is a deeply faithful woman who moors herself to the belief that if you pray enough, something will happen, and then you make the most out of whatever that something may be. She talks about the future in small increments but makes vast pronouncements. There are dreams for the next day and dreams for the next decade, and she doesn’t see a reason why she shouldn’t get to indulge in both.

“I got work to do,” she says. “When he calls me, I don’t plan to be in no rocking chair waiting for him. Too much to be done.”

Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet and author, has been a finalist for a National Book Award and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. His latest book is There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension.