THE GODMOTHER OF JUNETEENTH
FORT WORTH, TX, JUNE 19, 1939 —Just before dusk, as the Flake family prepares to head for another small, all-black Juneteenth Celebration, the mob gathers. Outside their house. With torches and gas cans.
Just a few sizzling days have passed since the Flakes, descendants of slaves, bought the small house on East Annie Street in one of Fort Worth’s all-white neighborhoods. Now some 500 people swarm around it. Otis Flake is determined to stand his ground.
“My dad came home from work and he had a gun,” Opal Lee remembered. “Police told him, ‘If you bust a cap, we will let this mob have you.’ Our parents sent us to friends several blocks away, and they left on the cusp of darkness. Those people went ahead and pulled our furniture and burned it. They did despicable things.”
Opal was 12 but she never forgot the mob, the charred home, and especially the date. "The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival."
Friday marks the sixth nationwide Juneteenth, but for Opal Lee, the day is a crown of sorts. Now just a few months from her 100th birthday, Lee is “the godmother of Juneteenth.” The nickname acknowledges the decades Lee devoted to promoting the day that, as a child, could have been her last.
“We have simply got to make people aware that none of us are free until we’re all free,” Lee often says, “and we aren’t free yet. There’s so many disparities.”
Growing up in Texas in the age of Jim Crow, Lee learned all about disparities. Along with segregation, she struggled as a single mother to raise four children on a school teacher’s salary. Each June 19, on through the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, Lee took her kids to Juneteenth Festivals. “It was like going to Christmas or Thanksgiving,” she recalled. “We had such a good time.”
Meanwhile white Fort Worth, other than opening the public pool to blacks for “their holiday,” paid no attention. Each June 20, the pool was drained, then re-opened. Whites Only.
Only when her kids were grown did Lee turn her unflagging energy to Juneteenth. The holiday, celebrating the moment in 1865 when the last slaves in Galveston, Texas learned of emancipation, deserved more respect. In 1975, working with the Tarrant County Black Memorial and Genealogical Association, Lee promoted a bigger, broader Juneteenth. Thirty thousand people showed up. Did she dare to dream?
After founding a non-profit service agency, Lee began making annual 2.5 mile Juneteenth walks through Fort Worth. The distance commemorated the two-and-a-half years between Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the freeing of the last slaves.
Yet Juneteenth grew slowly. On January 1, 1980, Texas declared Juneteenth a holiday. Just a few states followed suit, then a few more. In 1996, when a California Congresswoman drafted a bill to make Juneteenth a national holiday, the hope sank in committee. Opal Lee kept walking, 2.5 miles each Juneteenth, not just in Fort Worth but in Arkansas, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and the Carolinas.
"It's going to be a national holiday, I have no doubt about it,” she said. “My point is let's make it a holiday in my lifetime.”
In September 2016, shortly before her 90th birthday, Lee set out on another walk. Bearing a petition with 100,000 signatures, she “gathered some people at my church and they gave me the sendoff.” Heading east from Fort Worth, she walked 2.5 miles a day, stopping in various cities to rally support. Her final goal: Washington, D.C. where she hoped to hand the petition to President Obama. “I just knew somebody would notice a little old lady in tennis shoes. And they did.”
Lee made it to DC but Obama.in his final days on office was busy. Still, nationwide news of her walk helped gather another million signatures. “Ooh girl, I could do a holy dance,” Lee told the New York Times in 2020. “I’m so happy to see things coming to fruition and the fact that we are almost there making it a holiday.” Lee kept walking.
“I have persistence in my DNA,” she said. “There’s absolutely nothing that I start that I don’t want to finish. I gotta finish this.”
Finally. . . June 17, 2021: Lee sits in the White House near President Joe Biden. Front row. When introduced, she earns a standing ovation. The president gets down on one knee to greet her.
Signing the bill, Biden hands Lee the first ceremonial pen, then whispers in her ear. Lee still won’t tell the world what the president said to her. ‘I’m keeping something to myself. I’m not telling y’all.” But she did reveal that Biden wrote her a check for $6.19, to symbolize the date of Juneteenth, and to jumpstart contributions toward the new National Juneteenth Museum being planned in Fort Worth.
The following year, Lee was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Biden soon gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Mattel made an Opal Lee Barbie Doll, one of its “Inspiring Women” collection.
This coming week, the godmother of Juneteenth won’t be able to attend Fort Worth’s Freedom Vibes Festival 2026. Lee was hospitalized a few weeks ago but will watch online. Juneteenth, now nationwide, will honor its godmother, remembering her determination and her words..
“As a lifelong educator, I know that what we teach today shapes tomorrow," Lee said. "So if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love."