Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas. Her parents advocated for Mexican Americans’ civil rights, and she and her seven siblings grew up in a socially and politically active household. Idar attended the Methodist Holding Institute in Laredo, earning her teaching certificate in 1903. Afterward, she moved to Los Ojuelos, where she taught Chicano children (Mexican-Americans with no Anglo heritage). There, she experienced the segregation and poor conditions of this community. Upon the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Idar resigned from her teaching position and returned to Laredo to work in her father’s newspaper, La Crónica (The Chronicle), which advocated for Mexican-American rights. Using a pseudonym, she focused on the loss of Mexican culture and the use of the Spanish language, Mexican-Americans’ poor living and working conditions, and lynching. She also used this platform to promote women’s suffrage and wrote articles encouraging women to vote. In 1911, the Idar family organized the First Mexican Congress to unite Mexicans to fight injustice. That same year, she founded and served as the first president of the feminist organization La Liga Feminil Mexicaista (the League of Mexican Women), which encouraged women to break out of the domestic sphere, offered study sessions for women, and established bilingual schools for children. Over time, the organization provided food and clothes to those in need. She also founded the El Etudiante, a bilingual education newspaper for teachers which offered practical methods for bilingual education. During the Mexican Revolution in 1913, 28 years old Idar crossed the border to help people injured in the attack on the city of Nuevo Laredo. She joined the La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross) and volunteered as a nurse. In 1914, on her return to the US, she began to write for the El Progreso newspaper. Following a criticizing article she published about US President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send US troops to the border, the Texas Rangers came to newspaper offices to shut it down. However, Idar argued that per the First Amendment, the newspaper could publish opinion articles and physically block the entrance to the office. The Texas Rangers left but returned the next day while Idar was away and destroyed the newspaper’s presses. The incident did not hold her back, and she continued to publish her articles in other papers. Several months afterward, her father died, and she became the editor of La Crónica. Two years later, she founded another paper called Evolución. In 1917, at 32, she married Bartolo Juárez, and soon after, they moved to San Antonio, Texas. There, she became active in the Democratic Party, co-founded with her husband the Democratic Club, and served as editor of the Methodist Church publication El Heraldo Cristiano. She continued to promote equal rights for women and established a free kindergarten. She also volunteered as a translator at the county hospital and taught hygiene and childcare classes to women. She died at 61 from a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by advanced tuberculosis. Read more...

Opal Lee grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. Since she was a child, her family celebrated Juneteenth with food and baseball games. When she was 12 years old, only days after she and her family moved to a new house in a white neighborhood, a mob of 500 white supremacists rioted her home, vandalizing the furniture and setting the house on fire. In 1943, at the age of 16, she graduated from I.M. Terrell High School – the first black high school in Fort Worth. At the age of 26, she received a Bachelor’s degree from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. She returned to Fort Worth and began her life-long career as an educator at Amanda McCoy Elementary School. She met Dale Lee, a principal at Morningside Elementary, and the couple got married. A few years later, they got divorced, and she was teaching during the days while working nights at Convair to support her children. Over the years, she was an active member of her community, serving on the Fort Worth-Tarrant County Community Action Agency board and organizing events for Black History Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and Juneteenth. Lee earned her Master’s degree in Counseling and Guidance from North Texas State University and then worked as a Counselor for Fort Worth Independent School District until she retired in 1977 at the age of 51. Upon her retainment, she took her community involvement to the next level. She was among the founding members of Citizens Concerned with Human Dignity and co-founded the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, an organization that preserves the history of the city’s Black residence. Lee’s main effort was always toward making Juneteenth a federal holiday, officializing the celebrations of the abolition of slavery. To promote the cause, every year on June 19, she led a 2.5-mile walk – representing the 2.5 years that passed from the Emancipation Proclamation of 1865 until the news reached Texas, freeing more than 250,000 enslaved Black people and finalizing slavery in the US. In 2016, Lee turned her focus nationally. At the age of 89, she launched an online petition to make the day a federal holiday, in which she pledged to walk from Texas to Washington, DC, if she receives 100,000 signatures. More than 1.5 million people signed the petition, and on the first week of September, Lee began the 1,400 miles of “Opal’s Walk.” Each day she walked the symbolic 2.5 miles, passing through Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and the Virginias, reaching Washington, DC, in January of 2017. On June 17th, 2021, At the age of 94, Lee witnessed her lifetime efforts paying off as an honorary guest at the signing ceremony where President Joe Biden signed the bill that made Juneteenth a federal holiday. Read more...

Mary Ellen Lawson Dabbs was born in Rusk County, Texas. Her family owned a cotton plantation, and she participated in activities usually reserved only for men. She received her education at the county school and later attended the Furlow Masonic College in Georgia. She graduated first in her class. Back in Texas, she met her husband – a widower merchant with four children who was twenty years older than her. While taking care of his children and giving birth to five more, she helped him in his business. When his sons were older enough, he deeded over his property to them, and Dabbs realized she needs to be independent with an income of her own, so at the age of 33, she decided to end her tempestuous marriage and pursue medicine. The first step was not to have more children, and she stopped having sex with her husband. He physically abused her for that until she reported him to the authorities and moved to Sulphur Springs filing for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. Next, she began to study at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in Keokuk, Iowa, then midwifery in St. Louis. At the age of 37, she completed her medical degree. At the time, her divorce was not finalized, and her husband bribed the local sheriff and the district clerk not to notify her about the date of the final hearing, which caused the dismission of the divorce case. She moved to Dallas to practice medicine, but that attempt was unsuccessful, so she returned to Sulphur Springs, where she set up a practice presenting herself as a widow. With her own experience of the unequal results of the divorce prosses, Dabbs began to pay interest in the women’s rights movement. She moved to Fort Worth, where there were already seven women who practiced medicine. She was Texas delegate at the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and was chosen as the state chair of the Woman’s Southern Council. A year later, she co-founded the Texas Equal Rights Association –the Texan women’s suffrage society. At age 41, she was chosen as the president of the “Women’s Congress,” and promoted legislation concerning women’s welfare, such as age-of-consent and the establishment of a women’s industrial school, that became Texas Woman’s University. During the Spanish–American War, Dabbs volunteered for six months as a contract nurse at Camp Cuba Libre, where she contracted tuberculosis. It affected her health for the rest of her life. In 1899, after her house was destroyed by fire, she returned to Rusk, but eventually, she traded her farm and moved to Oklahoma, where she continued to practice medicine. When her tuberculosis was getting worse, she moved to New Mexico in the hope of being cured, but she took her own life when she realized the stage of the disease. She is buried in an anonymous grave for victims of tuberculosis. Read more...

Born in La Vernia, Texas. She received education in county schools, and at 15 years old, she attended Dr. Zealey’s Female College in Mississippi. At age 18, she married Arthur McCallum, and the couple settled in Austin, where he served as a school superintendent. Her first steps into politics were campaigning for woman suffrage and prohibition. She convinced the owner of the newspaper “The Austin American” to publish a regular column in which she wrote editorials against the women’s rights movement’s opposition. At the age of 35, she attended the University of Texas at Austin and became one of the first mothers to study at the university. She dropped out after three years and registered again a few years later, but never completing her degree. In 1915, she was chosen as president of the Austin Women Suffrage Association. Together with Minnie Fisher Cunningham, the president of the Texas Equal Suffrage Association, she led a statewide campaign for the women’s suffrage movement, giving speeches and publishing articles. In 1920, after the ratification of the 19th amendment, McCallum shifted her focus toward other political reforms. She became active in the League of Women Voters in Texas and served as its first vice president. She also served as executive secretary of the Women’s Joint Legislative Council, also known as the “Petticoat Lobby,” promoting legislation of women’s and social issues such as school funding, maternal and child health care, restrictions on child labor, illiteracy, prison reform, and stricter prohibition laws. After supporting Dan Moody’s campaign for state governor, asking women to vote for him, she was appointed the Secretary of State, a position she served for six years. McCallum is the only person in Texas to serve in this position under two governors and for more than one term. While in office, she discovered an original signed copy of the Texas Declaration of Independence and helped restore it. She remained active in politics throughout her life, giving speeches, writing her column, and leading women’s demonstrations. She served as an elector during the 1940 presidential election and as a state Democratic committeewoman during the next two presidential elections. She was appointed as the first city planning commission of Austin and leading women. In 1954, after women won the right to serve on juries, 77 years old, McCallum became the first female commissioner of a Travis County Grand Jury. Read more...