Meet the Incredible “Grandmother” of Juneteenth, Opal Lee

Our office and our nation have today off to commemorate Juneteenth, but I wanted to say a few quick words about the new holiday and especially about the “Grandmother” of Juneteenth, Opal Lee.

On June 19, 1865, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger finally reached Galveston, Texas with Union troops, where they informed a group of still-enslaved Black people that they had been freed by presidential proclamation—two and a half years earlier. This was the last place in the former Confederacy where there were still Black people being held in bondage, and so the holiday celebrates the true, final end to slavery in America.

The reason we have a federal holiday at all in honor of this date is due to the tireless advocacy of Opal Lee. She grew up in Marshall and Fort Worth, Texas, and her family celebrated Juneteenth every year. For Lee, like all Black Americans, the painful struggle for true emancipation didn’t end with the Civil War. On Juneteenth in 1939, when she was only 12 years old, a white mob rioted and burned down her family's home. 

To preserve and honor her community’s history, Lee joined the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, which oversaw annual Juneteenth celebrations locally. But Lee wanted to go bigger. In 2016, when she was 89 years old, Lee began her national quest, walking 1,400 miles from her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, DC, to raise awareness and support for making Juneteenth a federal holiday. “I knew I just had to spread the word about Juneteenth to everybody,” she told NPR.

In every city she visited along the way, she walked 2½ miles to mark the 2½ years it took for the news of emancipation to reach African Americans still held as slaves in Galveston. She brought a petition with more than 1.5 million signatures to Congress in a push to get the bill passed. She didn’t succeed, at least not at first. 

It isn’t easy to get a national holiday passed. The last one happened nearly 40 years ago in 1983 for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and there was significant controversy even over that. Critics of the Juneteenth proposed holiday pointed out the high cost to federal coffers of adding another holiday. But in 2020, the Black Lives Matter protests and the election shifted momentum Lee’s way, and this week the bill passed unanimously in the Senate and with only minimal resistance in the House.

In the White House signing ceremony yesterday, President Joe Biden got down on one knee to thank the Grandmother of Juneteenth personally for her long and heroic efforts. For Lee, whose paternal great-grandmother was born into slavery in Louisiana, the enactment of the holiday was “like a dream.”

“I knew I would see it happen in my lifetime,” she said with her signature throaty chuckle. “But I have to keep my cool.”