There will be obstacles, but you are never, ever, ever to give up.”

“If you have a passion and you know it’s right, you need to go for it. The interview was conducted at the five-acre Opal’s Farm, a project of the Fort Worth Community Food Bank, where Lee is a past board chair. “Sometime the long haul is long,” she said during an online interview for Creative Mornings Fort Worth in 2021. Lee, a longtime community advocate, has worked toward the national observance of Juneteenth for more than four decades, she said. People in Fort Worth march in 2021 to celebrate Juneteenth, which is now a federal holiday. Evans Avenue Plaza, where the walk will begin, holds nearly three-dozen plaques commemorating Fort Worth’s Black pioneers and early entrepreneurs and is adjacent to the planned site for a National Juneteenth Museum. On June 18, the 95-year-old Lee will lead a two-and-a-half mile walk from Evans Avenue Plaza in Fort Worth, the distance symbolizing the two and a half years that it took for enslaved people in Texas to learn that the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation had ended slavery. Last year, when President Joe Biden signed legislation making June 19 a federal holiday, he invited Lee, whom he called “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” to be at his side. Chan School of Public Health, “if a little old lady in tennis shoes is walking to D.C., people would take note.”Īnd they did - more than 1.6 million people signed an online petition Lee started and then Lee was invited to speak all over the U.S. She figured, Lee said on a webinar hosted last June by the Harvard T.H.

So Lee, who was 89 at the time, decided to walk from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. In 2016, Opal Lee, an activist, former educator, and member of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, began thinking that she hadn’t done enough toward the foundation’s campaign go make Juneteenth a national holiday. A year later, President Biden signed the necessary legislation. Opal Lee (center) leads a two-and-a-half mile walk in Fort Worth in 2020 to promote Juneteenth becoming a national holiday.

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