Black living history fact: Ms. Opal Lee When Opal Lee was growing up in Texas, she would spend Juneteenth picnicking with her family, first in Marshall, where she was born, then in Sycamore Park in Fort Worth, near the home she moved into at age 10. She and her family lived in a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. When Mrs. Lee was 12, a mob of 500 white supremacists set fire to her home and vandalized it. The structure was destroyed, and no arrests were made. Experiencing that hate crime pushed Mrs. Lee into a life of teaching, activism and, eventually, campaigning. In 2016, at the age of 89, she decided to walk from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in an effort to get Juneteenth named a national holiday. She traveled two and a half miles each day to symbolize the two and a half years that Black Texans waited between when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, on Jan. 1, 1863, abolishing slavery, and the day that message arrived in Galveston, where Black people were still enslaved, on June 19, 1865. Ms. Opal: “The difference between Juneteenth and the 4th of July? Woo, girl! The fact is none of us are free till we’re all free. Knowing that slaves didn’t get the word for two and a half years after the emancipation, can’t you imagine how those people felt? They’d been watching — that’s what they call Watch Night services — every New Year’s, thinking freedom was coming. And then to find out they were free, even two and a half years after everybody else. So, the 4th of July? Slaves weren’t free. You know that, don’t you? And so we just celebrate the hell out of the 4th of July, so I suggest that if we’re going to do some celebrating of freedom, that we have our festival, our educational components, our music, from June the 19 — Juneteenth — to the 4th of July. Now that would be celebrating freedom. On June 17, 2021, President Biden passed a bill making Juneteenth a National holiday. Ms. Opal stood alongside the president during this historic occasion and received the pen in which he used to sign off on the law. Black history IS American History!!! #opallee #juneteenth #wenotfreeuntilweallfree #blackhistoryeveryday https://www.instagram.com/p/CaV82dkL1ft/?utm_medium=tumblr
