{"id":341215,"date":"2026-06-18T11:43:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:43:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/341215\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T11:43:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:43:10","slug":"opal-lees-fort-worth-fight-to-make-juneteenth-a-holiday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/341215\/","title":{"rendered":"Opal Lee\u2019s Fort Worth fight to make Juneteenth a holiday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Opal Lee, the Fort Worth educator known as the \u201cgrandmother of Juneteenth,\u201d is approaching her 100th birthday this year after a decades-long campaign that turned June 19 into a national holiday.<\/p>\n

Her story \u2014 chronicled in Bud Kennedy\u2019s Fort Worth Star-Telegram columns over 11 years \u2014 traces a path from a violent 1939 attack on her family\u2019s home to a White House signing ceremony in 2021:<\/p>\n

In 1939, when she was 12-year-old Opal Flake, a white crowd estimated at 500 people stormed her family\u2019s home at East Annie Street and New York Avenue in Fort Worth on Juneteenth. They destroyed furniture and damaged the building while police remained \u201cnot mobilized,\u201d according to a 2015 Kennedy column.<\/a> 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\u2019s 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<\/a>.At 90, Lee completed a four-month \u201cWalk to D.C.\u201d 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\u2019 historic home, per a 2017 Star-Telegram column<\/a>.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, \u201cIt\u2019s a unifier for America. Slaves didn\u2019t free themselves,\u201d in his account of her return from Washington<\/a>.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 \u201ctore the house all up, then they set it on fire\u201d after police warned her father, railroad worker Otis Flake, not to shoot, in a June 2020 column<\/a>.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, \u201cThis is not a Black thing, or a white thing \u2014 it\u2019s a racism thing,\u201d as Kennedy reported<\/a>.Newly digitized archives revealed more of the history. Charles Stowe, a 65-year-old publisher of \u201cStowe\u2019s Chronicle\u201d 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 \u201cAnglo-Saxon Committee\u201d warned Black homebuyers away, in a 2021 column<\/a>.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, \u201cBut such hate never stopped her any more than it stopped the vast majority of you,\u201d Kennedy wrote<\/a>.At 96, Lee \u2014 who once taught third grade at Amanda McCoy and Dunbar elementary schools for $2,000 a year \u2014 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"In In 2020, Opal Lee stood in front of the East Annie Street lot where white rioters attacked, invaded and burned her family\u2019s home in 1939. Amanda McCoy amccoy@star-telegram.com \"President President Joe Biden speaks with Opal Lee after he signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, June 17, 2021, in Washington. Evan Vucci AP \"Opal Opal Lee went to the 2009 inauguration of President Obama with this letter asking him to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Bud Kennedy bud@star-telegram.com \"In In 1939, Opal Lee\u2019s family fled their home as a white mob smashed and burned their possessions. Star-Telegram archives <\/p>\n

This story was originally published June 18, 2026 at 4:24 AM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Opal Lee, the Fort Worth educator known as the \u201cgrandmother of Juneteenth,\u201d is approaching her 100th birthday this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":341216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-341215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}