PEMBROKE PARK, Fla. – At 97 years old, she’s still doing it, walking the walk and talking the talk.
Opal Lee has become a national treasure.
She has gained international fame as the “grandmother of Juneteenth.”
Back in 2016, Lee had an idea to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. She had recently retired from teaching.
“I had raised four kids. They were up and out you just kind of get an itch that you need to do something,” she said. “I decided that if a little old lady was walking from Texas to D.C. that’s what I proposed that I was going to see the president, somebody would take notice and they did.”
Walking from Texas to the nation’s capital is no small feat: The distance is more than 1400 miles.
“So when she comes to me with this baked plan on Juneteenth of 2016 and she tells me that she wants to walk to see President Obama, gran-dear you won’t see him before he leaves office,” said Dion Sims, Lee’s granddaughter.
Lee had more than her fair share of detractors.
“Oh they really thought, ‘That old lady, she is going to get tired and go back home,’” she said. “They just didn’t know. I think I was born with some of my grandpa in me.”
Lee’s decision to do something about Juneteenth began when she was 89 years old.
Her vision would require an army of volunteers from city to city and state to state.
“People would join me,” she said. “We walked through Fort Worth, Arlington, Grand Prairie and Balch Springs and Joppee.”
It was in the tiny town of Joppee, Texas, that Lee faced her first setback.
She was promised an RV, but promise made, promise broken.
“They decided what I was doing was too political,” she said. “They kept their RV but we didn’t miss a beat. Somebody gave us a ride and somebody gave us another one.”
The Lee family called on the late Ron Myers, the so-called “father of Juneteenth,” to lean on friends for favors.
They joined Lee step by step.
“So we hopscotched, we were in Little Rock, Fort Smith, Colorado Springs, Chicago, St. Louis, down to Atlanta, to Selma, so she could walk on her 90th birthday,” said Sims.
In every city, she would walk only two-and-a-half miles.
The distance represents the two-and-a-half years it took for Union General Gordon Granger to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation and free the slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865.
While Lee was making her way to Washington one step at a time, she was collecting signatures.
Lee wanted 100,000, but in six months she wasn’t even close.
That was until a cell phone camera captured the shocking death of George Floyd.
“When George Floyd was murdered, the world wanted to let the African-American community know,” said Lee. “We went from 5,000 to 80,000 signatures.”
Soon Lee would set her sights on one million signatures.
In 2019, she got an unlikely call from a celebrity.
“Sean Combs wanted to help, he had never heard about Juneteenth,” she said. “We had also had help from Lupita (Nyongo), Usher, Kim Kardashian, they had posted on their social and Juneteenth and their petition”
By the time, Lee and her new family of volunteers had reached Capitol Hill in September 2020, they had one-and-a-half million signatures.
She had more than accomplished her mission.
“We got this call to go to the white house from President Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” said Lee.
Biden would make Juneteenth a federal holiday in June 2021.
“And he signed that bill into law and gave me that pen,” said Lee. “You wait until I get my museum up, it is going to be on display.”
Lee’s home looks like a museum. Her devotion to the community has been well-documented and her home is also decorated with awards, articles and achievements.
Seven schools have given her honorary doctoral degrees, and she now has the title Dr. Opal Lee.
In 2022, she was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and, in May 2024, she returned to the White House, receiving the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“I know other people who have done so much more and deserve it. I wish they had more medals to give out,” she said. “I want people to know that they can make themselves a committee of one, to change somebody’s mind, that if they can be taught to hate, that they can be taught to love and it’s up to us to do that.”