Opal Lee, 'Grandmother of Juneteenth' turns 100, celebration honoring her held at National Juneteenth Museum

Opal Lee, a retired Texas teacher known for her activism and as the "Grandmother of Juneteenth," turned 100 on Wednesday.  A celebration honoring her decades of advocacy was held at the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

As part of its Uniting Voices Speaker Series, the National Juneteenth Museum hosted "A Conversation with Michelle Obama," with the former first lady leading the celebration of Lee’s extraordinary legacy while looking ahead to the future she has worked for decades to make possible.

Who is Opal Lee?

The backstory:

Lee worked as a teacher and counselor in the Fort Worth school district for over two decades after starting a family, and became active in the local community and beyond in her retirement. 

Dig deeper:

She was born Oct. 7, 1926, in Marshall, Texas, and a traumatic family tragedy that happened at a young age on Juneteenth shaped her resilience and activism in her later years. 

When she was 12, a racist mob drove her family out of the home her parents had just bought in 1939. Newspaper articles at the time said the mob that grew to about 500 people broke windows in the house and dragged furniture out into the street and smashed it, The Associated Press reported.  

What is Juneteenth? 

The backstory:

Juneteenth marks the day – June 19, 1865 – that commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. 

It’s the day when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas – two months after the Confederacy had surrendered, and more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the Southern states.  

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 establishing it as a new federal holiday. Lee was one of the people standing next to the president when he signed Juneteenth into law, and took home the pen he used to sign the bill. 

2016 Juneteenth walk 

The backstory:

Her push for a national Juneteenth holiday garnered nationwide attention in 2016 when she organized a 1,400-mile walk from her home in Texas to Washington, D.C. 

The National Women’s History Museum says she walked 300 miles, and did so symbolically in 2.5-mile increments, commemorating the two and a half years it took for the news of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach enslaved people in Galveston. Lee also collected 1.6 million signatures for her petition to commemorate the day with a federal holiday, the museum said. 

She was 89 at the time. 

Out of her walks was born her catchphrase, that she’s "just a little old lady in tennis shoes getting in everybody’s business."

Opal Lee’s activism awards

In 2022, Lee was nominated by members of Congress to receive a Nobel Peace Prize for her decades-long work pushing to commemorate Juneteenth as a national holiday. 

She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2024 in recognition of her civil rights efforts.  

Local perspective:

Some of her local activism included a large community garden in Fort Worth that produced thousands of pounds of fruits and vegetables to deliver to people who couldn’t leave their homes, and working alongside others to transform a former Ku Klux Klan auditorium into a museum and center for the arts.

What they're saying:

Lee told The Associated Press in 2021, "We don’t want people to think that Juneteenth is a stopping point, because it isn’t. It’s a beginning, and we’re going to address some of the disparities that we know exist."