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...