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Opal Lee walked from Texas to DC to draw attention to Juneteenth.
June 18, 2021, 6:08 pm
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When President Joe Biden signed into law a bill Thursday making Juneteenth a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States, there was a woman in the room who commanded the attention she deserved.
Opal Lee was dubbed the “grandmother of the movement” for making Juneteenth a federal holiday by Biden, who at one point left the stage and went to the 94-year-old to speak with her directly.
And Vice President Kamala Harris, the first black female Vice President, gave it to me in her remarks, saying, “And looking across this room, I see the advocates, the activists, the leaders, who have been calling for this day for so long, including the one and only Mrs. Opal Lee.
Vice President Kamala Harris watches Opal Lee (second from left), the activist known as Jontenth’s grandmother, being given a pen after President Joe Biden signs the National Independence Day Act for June, in the East Room of the White House, June 17, 2021.
In 2016, when she was 89 years old, Lee, a former teacher and lifelong activist, walked from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to the nation’s capital in an effort to get Juneteenth a national holiday.
Four years later, Lee’s activism helped push Congress to institute a new national holiday for the first time in nearly 40 years. In 1983, lawmakers designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day as the third Monday in January to commemorate the assassinated civil rights leader.
“I was thrilled. I was high,” she told me Friday on “GMA3: What You Need to Know” about her reaction to signing the law. “I was so happy that I could perform a sacred dance.”
Juneteenth – also known as Freedom Day, Liberation Day, and Liberation Day – is celebrated on June 19 to mark the day in 1865 when African-American slaves in Galveston, Texas, were among the last to be told to be set free – two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation Slaves, slavery outlawed in the Confederacy and two months after the Civil War officially ended.
President Joe Biden is lauded as he seeks a pen to sign Greece’s 10th National Independence Day law into law as Vice President Kamala Harris stands in the East Room of the White House on June 17, 2021.
To this day, Lee walks two and a half miles each year on June 19 to celebrate the time between the Emancipation Proclamation and the time news of freedom reached Galveston.
“Walking tomorrow will be a joy,” she said. “We’ve done it before and I’ll go two and a half miles [tomorrow] It symbolizes that the slaves in Texas did not know that they were released for two and a half years.”
Lee said she now hopes more people across the country will join her in the walk, saying, “We need to do the work of everyone involved.”
Lee, a Texas native, said she experienced racial unrest first-hand during her childhood, including one night, on June 19, 1939, when a group of hundreds of hooligans set fire to her family’s home.
“People didn’t want us. They started gathering. The newspaper said the police can’t control the mob. My father came with a gun and the police told them that if he adjusts the headscarf they will leave us for the mob.” Lee https://abc7news.com/opal-lee-juneteenth-2021-who-is-our-america-black-freedom/10761761/”target=”_blank”> told ABC’s KTRK-TV in Houston. With things, and when they left, they took out the furniture, burned it, and burned the house.”
“People said that maybe that was the trigger that got me to Juneteenth, I don’t know,” she said.
Opal Lee, 93, stands in front of the East Annie Street plaza on June 2, 2021, as white rioters attacked, invaded and burned her family home in 1939.
Advocates like Lee say it provides a day to reflect on the terrible stigma of slavery in American history and the celebrations that seem similar to those of the Fourth of July.
The federal government said most employees will be on leave Friday to mark the occasion, around which celebrations have become more common in recent years, and took on added significance in 2020 when the country underwent a racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd.
Lee told me she hoped the federal holiday would help make people aware of what happened and “decided that this should not happen again.” She also hopes that June will become the National Unity Day.
People pray together during the Juneteenth event at Centennial Olympic Park on June 19, 2020, in Atlanta.
“Juneteenth is not a black thing and it is not a Texan thing,” she said. “People are everywhere, I don’t care what nationality, we all bleed red blood.”
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