Opal Lee: Community Activist
For many Black Americans, June 19th has long been a bittersweet day of the celebration of freedom. Juneteenth (a combination of June and 19th) is observed to memorialize June 19, 1865 – a date two months after the Civil War ended, and two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation promised to end slavery, when military troops arrived in Texas to enforce the decree.
Texas was the last state in the union to free its population of 250,000 enslaved people. With the presence of national troops, it was final outlawing of slavery in the United States.
Laws can force change, but memories can have an equally powerful impact. For Opal Lee, June 19th is also the date of a violent childhood memory that shaped her life as a community change agent. Since the 1980s, she has used the ideals of Juneteenth to help thousands of people in her community, through the creation of a community farm, an African American historical society and many other social welfare groups.
Opal Flake was born on Oct. 7, 1926, in Marshall, a small town in the northeastern corner of Texas. For Flake, Marshall was where she first celebrated Juneteenth. “It was just like another Christmas,” Flake recalled. “They’d have music and food. They’d have games and food. They’d have all kinds of entertainment and food.”
By the time she was ten, however, Flake’s family had moved 185 miles west to Fort Worth, where there were more economic opportunities. Her mother, Mattie Broadus, found work as a cook and her father, Otis Flake, worked for the railroad. Flake and her two brothers attended the local elementary school in their Southside neighborhood.
After suffering injuries in an accident while riding a city bus, her mother received a monetary settlement. The unexpected windfall enabled the family to purchase a home on East Annie Street, making them the first Black family in the mostly white neighborhood.
On June 19, 1939, a few days after moving in, a mob of 500 white residents swarmed the property, smashing windows and breaking into the house. They set a fire that destroyed everything. “Those people went ahead,” Flake remembers “and pulled our furniture and burned it. They did despicable things.”
Outnumbered and overwhelmed by the mob, the local police were unable to stop the violence. Lee remembers her father rushing home from his job with a gun only to get a warning.
“Police told him, ‘If you bust a cap, we will let this mob have you,’” she recalls. “Our parents sent us to friends several blocks away, and they left on the cusp of darkness.” The family never spoke again about the horrific incident, but Flake carried the memories of it long into her adult life. "The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival,” she said.
The family relocated to another street in the Southside and Lee attended I.M. Terrell High, the city’s first all-Black high school. When she graduated at 16, Flake’s parents wanted her to go onto college, but Flake had other ideas. She married Joe Roland, her high school sweetheart and they started a family. Five years and four children later, the marriage was over. Flake faced a harsh reality: in 1948, a black female single parent in Texas with a high school diploma was destined for poverty.
Taking her parents’ earlier advice, Flake enrolled at Wiley College back in her hometown of Marshall. During the week, her mother would watch her kids while she took classes and worked at the college bookstore. On the weekends, she was back in Fort Worth, working an assortment of jobs to make ends meet and pay for her education.
Three and a half years later, she had a teaching degree in elementary education. Returning to Fort Worth, she landed a teaching job, but the pay was $2000 a year – the equivalent of about $23,000 today – hardly enough to support a family of five. So, Flake took a second job as a maid for Convair, an aerospace manufacturer and one of the biggest local employers. For years she clocked a 16-hour day. “I’d go (to teach) at 8 a.m., get off at 3 p.m.,” Flake said. “There’d be a car waiting for me and I’d check in at 4 and get off at 12.”
Flake’s teaching career spanned the civil rights era, a time when segregation gave way to integration in the classrooms and society. The world was changing dramatically, but raising her children was a priority. After marrying her second husband, Dale Lee, the principal of one of the city‘s elementary schools in 1967, Lee got a master’s degree in counseling and guidance. It took her career in a new direction. She became a home school counselor, visiting parents and getting them social services when they needed them, so that their kids could continue to attend school.
When Lee retired in 1977, she began her second career as a community activist. Over the next four decades, she helped save a local food bank from going under and started a farm to grow and distribute fresh produce to needy families and provide jobs.
She also helped found the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society to preserve local Black history. One of her roles was organizing the annual Juneteenth celebration. Nearly every year she would lead a two and a half mile walk on June 19th, representing the two and a half years it took for word of the Emancipation Proclamation to reach Texas. As more and more states began recognizing the day, Lee continued pushing lawmakers to make it a national holiday.
In September 2016, Lee felt she had to “go big…and double down” on her mission. Her goal was to meet with President Barack Obama after walking the 1,400 miles between Fort Worth and Washington DC. Walking ten miles a day on a route that took her through major cities including Denver, Colorado Springs, Atlanta and St. Louis, she arrived in Washington, D.C. five months later in January 2017.
“I just knew people would notice a little old lady in tennis shoes,” she said, “and they did.” Lee didn’t get to plead her case with the president, but the walk energized the campaign. Along the way, media attention to brought more than 1.5 million signatures on an online petition.
It would take four more years of advocacy, but on June 17, 2021, with Opal Lee attending a ceremony in the Oval Office, President Joe Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth an official American holiday. Lee received the first pen used to sign the document and received a standing ovation during the ceremony. In 2022, Lee’s lifelong mission was recognized in a letter nominating her for the Nobel Peace Prize. “The celebration of Juneteenth became for her not just a day to celebrate the freeing of enslaved people in Texas but the recognition of the need to uphold the freedoms that African Americans gained and a call to fight ... for equality for all humans.”
©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project