Opal Lee was born in Marshall, Texas, in 1926, the oldest of three children of Otis and Mattie Flake. The family moved to Fort Worth during the Depression, her parents hoping her father could find steady work. Texas Monthly says he worked as a custodian and her mother cooked for wealthy families. In June 1939 they bought a house at 940 East Annie Street, on the Southside, and moved in on the 18th. BlackPast says they were the first Black family on the street.
The night of June 19
Early on June 19, 1939, a white mob came to the house. Britannica says the rioters ransacked it, and Texas Monthly says they demanded the family leave, trashed the home and set it on fire. Opal was twelve. Her parents fled in the dark, and she and her brothers stayed with friends a few blocks away. BlackPast and Wikipedia put the crowd at about 500, and both say the house was burned down. The date was Juneteenth, the day Texans mark for General Gordon Granger's arrival in Galveston in 1865.
Walking it forward
Lee graduated from I. M. Terrell High School, which Texas Monthly calls the city's first Black high school, at sixteen and took a degree at Wiley College in Marshall. She taught third grade at Amanda McCoy Elementary School and later worked as a home school counselor for the Fort Worth schools, retiring in 1977. That year she helped found the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, which organized Juneteenth celebrations at Sycamore Park. Britannica says a 1975 celebration she helped organize drew more than 30,000 people. She often walked two and a half miles at them, for the two and a half years that news of freedom took to reach Texas.
In September 2016, at eighty-nine, she set out from Fort Worth for Washington, D.C., and arrived in January 2017. Britannica says she walked some hundreds of miles of the route. She had planned to lobby President Obama, who had left office by then, so she took her case to Congress. She carried a petition for a national holiday, and BlackPast counts 1.6 million signatures. On June 17, 2021, President Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday, with Lee beside him. Britannica says he handed her a check for $6.19 toward a Juneteenth museum in Fort Worth. In 2024 he gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The lot on Annie Street
Trinity Habitat for Humanity acquired the Annie Street lot in January 2021, according to KERA, and Britannica reports that Lee bought it back for $10 in 2023. Habitat, Texas Capital and HistoryMaker Homes built a new house on the site, and in June 2024 she received the keys. The builders wrote notes on the framing before the drywall went up, and Lee said the house gave her a chance to make new memories in place of the painful past. Texas Monthly says she lives on her childhood property now, so the house is a private home and not a stop on any tour.
The place to visit is the school she graduated from, where the I. M. Terrell High School marker stands in Fort Worth.