Opal Lee is spending Juneteenth the way she has made it her own: with a symbolic 2.5-mile walk, this time by car in her native Fort Worth, Texas, and with a breakfast of prayer for unity in the nation. At 99, the woman known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth is still turning a personal ritual into a public reminder of how the holiday became a federal observance.
That matters today because Juneteenth is no longer only a local commemoration or a date tied to Black Texas history. It marks 161 years since the last group of enslaved people learned they had been freed in Galveston, Texas, after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and it became a federal holiday in 2021 after years of pressure from Lee and others.
Lee’s campaign was never just symbolic, even when the symbols were powerful. In 2016, she walked 2.5 miles a day from Fort Worth to Washington, DC, matching the two-and-a-half-year delay between emancipation and the news reaching Galveston. By 2020, her petition had gathered more than 1.6 million signatures, a scale that showed how far her message had traveled before then-President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act in 2021.
Her influence sits on top of a life shaped by loss and persistence. When Lee was 12 years old, a racist mob destroyed her family’s house and all their belongings, after her parents had worked tirelessly to buy the home in a predominantly white neighborhood. She later wrote about that history in A Committee of One, published through Amistad, and used her work as a visiting teacher, her food pantry and a community farm that employed previously incarcerated people to keep serving others.
The holiday’s meaning still gets narrowed, which is part of why Lee’s message keeps landing. Promise Roland has said there is a misconception that Juneteenth is only for Black Americans or Texans, but Lee has spent years pushing the opposite view: that it is a shared American day, and a precious one at that. After the federal act was signed, she visited the White House, then kept returning to the same point that has defined her public life: people must pass lessons on so others learn from them.
Her personal stakes are now tied to the land itself. In 2023, Habitat for Humanity gifted Lee her childhood land back and built a home on it, and she still lives there today. That return gave her activism a physical address, but not a finish line. This year, participants will walk beside her in Fort Worth and host their own walks in Cincinnati, Honolulu and Los Angeles, while Lee keeps celebrating in the place where her story began.
The central question is not whether Juneteenth has become national; it already has. The more useful test is whether the holiday will keep its wider meaning as more people take part in it, or whether it will be folded back into the narrower view Lee has spent a lifetime trying to correct.
