Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – The joy of a lifetime to share the stage with the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” the retired Texas schoolteacher and survivor of Jim Crow, Mrs. Opal Lee, who led the movement to make Juneteenth a national holiday, who finally got her wish in 2021 and was awarded the Medal of Freedom at the White House for making it happen.
Juneteenth was seared into her memory in childhood. She was 12 years old when a white mob stormed and burned down her family’s home right after they moved into an all-white neighborhood in Ft. Worth, TX. They managed to escaped with their lives. It was June 19, 1939.
She has dedicated her life to memorializing the day that the last enslaved African-Americans were finally liberated — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation and months after the end of the Civil War.
She made a historic walk from Ft. Worth to Washington in 2016, at the age of 89, to dramatize its significance. Now, at 97, she has set her sights on a museum dedicated to this history. It was my honor to deliver an address in Ft. Worth in support of the Juneteenth Museum, which is still in the planning stages, and to trade insights with the woman behind the Federal holiday and, one day soon, a place to honor and learn more about it.
But the trauma of the razing of her family home has never left her. She looked into what happened to the land her family once owned at 940 East Annie Street in Ft. Worth and discovered that it was in the hands of Habitat for Humanity.
She went to them to buy the land back for her family. Habitat for Humanity would not sell it to her. “They gave it to me,” Mrs. Lee said. “God is so good.” Now she has just completed building her new house on the land that her family was forced to flee back on this historic day, 85 years ago, fulfilling her parents’ dream.
#juneteenth | Posted on 20/Jun/2024 01:04:33
