FORT WORTH, Texas — At 95 years old, Opal Lee is simply trying to figure out how to help the next person.
In her lifetime, Lee has witnessed some of the worst of humanity, seeing her home attacked by an angry mob, attending segregated schools and becoming an educator because that was one of the few professions she saw available for Black women.
But in the same lifetime, the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” stepped up and has spent decades aiding her Fort Worth neighbors who were hungry or homeless. She played a key role in gaining national recognition for a momentous moment in Black history — the celebration of independence for Black Americans on Juneteenth — and is now nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Thirty-three members of Congress, led by U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Texas, signed Lee’s nomination letter.
The activist is living on cloud nine, waking up some mornings wondering if being invited to the Oval Office to witness Juneteenth become a national holiday really happened.
Those who work alongside Lee believe that she’s a winner regardless of the results of the Nobel Peace Prize, the winner of which will be announced on Oct. 7, Lee’s 96th birthday. Lee already has affected so many people.
Lee still attends City Hall meetings and delivers meals from her south Fort Worth food bank to those who are bedridden. She plans to urge legislators to support a bill that would pay incarcerated men and women in Texas for their labor.
If she happens to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which will be formally presented at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway, on Dec. 10, she plans to use the approximately $1 million in prize money to send several container houses to a woman in Uganda who gave birth to 44 children.
Lee believes her mission to serve is not done yet.
“You got to help people if you can,” she said. “And I can. I still can.”
Generations of service
Lee said her desire to give back is something that’s ingrained in her DNA.
She was born to Mattie Broadous Flake and Otis Flake on Oct. 7, 1926. She was raised in Marshall, about 185 miles east of Fort Worth.
Her mother, who raised Lee and her two brothers through the Great Depression, would offer her home, and the best meals, to residents Lee’s father would send to the house.
Before then, her grandmother, who was busy raising 19 children, never turned away a neighbor who showed up at her door needing help.
For Lee, helping neighbors is something that’s been passed down for generations.
She and her mother and brothers, who were two and four years younger than her, moved to Fort Worth in 1937, when she was about 10.
Her dad had arrived in the city earlier, looking for work, but hadn’t yet sent for the family to join him.
“So my mom sold everything she could for train fare for (her) and three children,” she said.
After arriving in Fort Worth, Lee’s mother got straight to work the next day as a cook, and the family was taken in by friends.
Lee enrolled in classes at a school for six weeks until her mother and father reunited and moved to the south side of Fort Worth, an area of town she’s now lived in almost all of her life.
“My parents had bought this house in a white neighborhood. … My mom had it fixed up so nice,” Lee said.
Attacked on Juneteenth
When Lee was 12, on June 19, 1939, hundreds of white rioters gathered outside her family’s home.
“This one (riot) was tailored to our family,” Lee said. “It was Juneteenth, which is a day in Texas which we knew we were all free. It had significance that people were storming and burning our place down.”
The police showed up to their home but couldn’t control the mob, Lee recalled.
“My dad came from work and he had a gun. Police told him, ‘If you bust a cap, we will let this mob have you,’” Lee said. “Our parents sent us to friends several blocks away, and they left on the cusp of darkness. Those people went ahead and pulled our furniture and burned it. They did despicable things, but our parents never discussed it with us.”
Everything inside the house was burned. The house itself wasn’t burned to the ground but was damaged and uninhabitable.
And although her parents never spoke about the event, Lee would witness similar acts in the neighborhood.
She recalled a Black family who owned a home a few houses away from hers but had never moved into it, and instead rented it to white families. Sometimes white people would come and shoot a gun, which would force Black people who were gathering to scatter.
Lee’s family later ended up moving a few more blocks deeper into the south side. Lee said that other than the attack on her childhood home, and a few other incidents, she didn’t have many interactions with violent discrimination during her childhood.
“When I was going to school, going to church, doing the things in my neighborhood that I’ve been doing, I never had any more trouble,” Lee said. “I knew — I rode the buses, or we had street cars in my day and time — I knew where to go and sit, in the back of the bus or streetcar.”
The family’s generosity never wavered, and the strength and dedication to others that Lee’s mother had continued into her final years.
Regena Taylor, current executive director of the Community Food Bank in Fort Worth, met Lee and her mother in the late 1980s. Taylor said Lee is determined in everything she does, and it was evident that she was similar to Mattie Flake.
“She got that from her momma,” Taylor said. “ ... I never met Miss Opal Lee’s father, but I met her mother and she was tenacious, too.”
‘I’m ready to go to college now!’
As a teen, Lee attended Tarrant County’s only Black high school at the time — I.M. Terrell High School — and graduated at 16.
Lee said that the school was never a target for racism while she was there, but her teachers, who were familiar with discrimination, did their best to teach their Black students how to “go around (racism), how to escape it.”
“The young men knew, if they were stopped by the police, they were to be civil: give their name, address and not, you know, be killed,” Lee said. “We knew when we went to department stores and things of that nature, we had to be civil with the clerks because the police would be called. We knew there was some certain areas we didn’t go because that’s not our neighborhood and we’re not supposed to. We were insulated from all this. Our parents kept us away from those kinds of things, and we had enough sense to obey.”
However, there was one crucial thing Lee didn’t listen to right away.
“I didn’t obey my mom and go to college,” she said.
Lee, instead, had fallen in love with the best-looking boy in the school, Joe Roland.
Lee married Roland straight out of high school and was pregnant with their first child, Jo Ann, at 17. She had three more children, Joe Thomas Roland Jr., Thomas Edwin and Gerrald Leslie.
“My mom had wanted me to go back to Marshall and go to Wiley College,” Lee said. “She was so disappointed. She didn’t even go to the wedding.”
But the marriage with Roland didn’t last.
“It took me four babies, four years, to realize I was going to have to raise my husband, too. I had to cut my losses,” Lee said. “I went home to my mom with four children and had the nerve to say, ‘I’m ready to go to college now!’”
Her mother agreed to watch Lee’s children but said she was on her own in raising money for her higher education. When asked how many jobs she worked at the time, Lee couldn’t count them.
“I was a cook. I worked in nightclubs … in the ladies’ room. I was an attendant at Texas Hotel,” Lee said. “I got that money to go to college, and I spent it. I bought the kids a television so she wouldn’t have to run out looking for them. I go to college without a dime. They put me to work in the college bookstore.”
Lee would work at the college bookstore throughout the week, then using the train or bus, would travel back to Fort Worth on the weekends to keep working the jobs she had previously. She would even help her mom — whom she described as a gourmet chef — sell the “best sweet potato pies in the country.”
“I was always so tired on Mondays, but I got through it in three and a half years,” Lee said, adding that she studied elementary education because it was the only thing available and that she felt she wasn’t ambitious enough to want to do anything else.
Lee said she came home and got a job teaching that paid $2,000 a year. She couldn’t feed four children on $2,000, so she decided to get another job as a maid at Convair, an aerospace manufacturer that was later partly bought by Lockheed.
“I’d go (to teach) at 8 a.m., get off at 3 p.m.,” Lee said. “There’d be a car waiting for me and I’d check in at 4 and get off at 12.”
Teaching during desegregation
Lee worked at several campuses and remained at the Fort Worth school district for nearly two decades.
She taught at McCoy Elementary School, which she used to attend as a child, and met her second husband, Dale T. Lee, who was a principal at another elementary school in the ‘60s. The couple was married for more than 30 years before he passed away.
Before and during her early years as an educator, Lee was living in a deeply segregated city.
Public pools in neighborhoods were for Black or white swimmers only. Forest Park pool opened for Black residents each year only on Juneteenth. The next day, staff drained and refilled the pool.
“We couldn’t go in clothing stores and try on things we liked,” Lee said. “There was segregated water fountains. … Jobs, except for teaching or preaching, maybe a lawyer, were non-existent.”
That slowly began to change as Fort Worth underwent integration efforts. At that time, it was Lee’s children who were participating in rallies and protests.
“They were picketing the stores, one on Evans Avenue. My daughter and others, they had (joined United Front),” she said.
Lee never participated in the protests. She was too busy trying to keep herself and her family alive, she said.
Downtown stores slowly became accessible to both Black and white residents, although one grocery store opted to close rather than hire Black residents, Lee said.
Soon, schools began to integrate. Lee’s classrooms transitioned from being all Black to having white and Mexican children.
“And you taught the same way you’ve been teaching,” Lee said.
She didn’t find the children to be a lot different compared with when she was in school, and she didn’t have trouble talking to parents.
“All they wanted was a decent education for their children,” she said
Her journey within education shifted when she became a visiting teacher.
“I was teaching 8-year-olds for so long, I began to act like them, so they gave me another position,” she said.
The new role was really social work, Lee said. If a child was out of clothes, shoes, food or a place to stay, that was her responsibility to try to mitigate.
When she retired in 1977, that kind of work followed her into her community activism.
Community Food Bank and Opal’s Farm
Whether it was the Attorney General’s Office, the IRS or somewhere else, Opal Lee always had some work for Regena Taylor to do after they met in the late ‘80s.
“It started off at church with, ‘Baby, what you doing?’” Taylor said.
Lee was Board of Directors Chair of the then-Metroplex Food Bank, which was at risk of going under because of old debt, Taylor said.
The food bank was located near Riverside and Berry, an area that had a lot of need, and Lee felt that it was important to keep it afloat.
So Lee asked Taylor to join her and help her clear the debt.
Taylor had just started working part-time at Procter & Gamble after nine years of being a homemaker, so she wasn’t sure she could find the time to help.
“And (Lee) said, ‘Baby, you’re working part-time. Work part-time for Procter & Gamble and then work some for me!’” Taylor said with a laugh.
Through Lee’s determination, they cleared the food bank’s debt and began to expand the nonprofit into what’s now the Community Food Bank.
“She kept the dream alive,” Taylor said.
Even with setbacks, like a devastating 2006 fire that resulted in the loss of the building, the food bank has operated for decades.
The building it’s in now, a space of about 40,000 square feet at 3000 Galvez Avenue, was gifted to the food bank after nearly a year of affording rent through donations.
“The month we didn’t have [rent], the people who owned it said, ‘Looks like you’re doing a good job in the neighborhood,’” Lee said. “We were feeding over 500 families a day. And they gave us the $1.3 million building. They gave it to us.”
For a time, the food bank only had bagels and yogurt to give out, but now its provides fresh foods like meats, produce and dairy. It also has toilet paper, cleaning supplies, diapers, furniture, school supplies, strollers, clothes and much more.
The bank even had specialty baby formula for clients during the recent shortage.
Lee’s spirit of giving and collaboration has led to mutually beneficial partnerships with other organizations and businesses. The food bank can now serve anyone from any ZIP code, Taylor said.
The reach of the food bank is increased every year, Taylor said, and Lee instilled a culture of treating everyone with dignity and respect, no matter their situation.
The food bank also led to the beginning of Opal’s Farm, which is east of downtown near the Trinity River.
“I polled people standing in line at the food bank and 66 of them said they’d like to farm. So, I asked (the Tarrant Regional Water District) and they gave me use of 13 acres near the river,” Lee said, adding that on the farm, she chose to hire those who had formerly been incarcerated and were unable to get another job.
The farm, which grows a little of everything, including watermelon, herbs, tomatoes, potatoes, beans and greens, produces food for the Community Food Bank, Funky Town Fridge, the WIC Program and more.
Through the food bank and farm, Lee has helped improve the lives of hundreds of people, said Gregory Joel, the farm’s manager.
“It’s hard for me to picture Fort Worth without Miss Opal,” he said.
The scope of Lee’s true impact is difficult to encapsulate, a fact that people around her acknowledge.
Dione Sims, executive director of Unity Unlimited and Lee’s granddaughter, said she has served in roles for Habitat For Humanity, created a nonprofit named Citizens Concerned with Human Dignity and run a computer literacy school for senior citizens.
Lee also been involved in the Tarrant County Black Historical & Genealogical Society, the Historic & Cultural Landmarks Commission, AIDS Outreach committee, Evans Avenue Business Association, Good Samaritans, and Riverside Neighborhood Advisory Council, the Grandmother’s Club, Ethel Ransom Humanitarian & Cultural Club, Unity Unlimited Inc. and her church, Baker Chapel AME.
“She’s always thinking about how to better someone’s life,” Sims said. “ ... She never pigeonholed herself to one specific area. It was just whatever needed to be done.”
Serving, retiring and the mission for Juneteenth
The 95-year-old has since retired from working at the Community Food Bank, but she still likes to drop by twice a month to pick up and deliver food for people who are bed-ridden, in wheelchairs or unable to access the building before it closes.
But besides helping her local community — Lee says she still has a Santa Claus-like list of things she wants to change in Fort Worth — one of her lifelong missions was to see Juneteenth become a federal holiday.
Growing up in Marshall, her family would go to the fairgrounds, where they could celebrate the holiday with games, music and food, commemorating the 2.5 years enslaved Texans waited for their freedom until Union troops arrived on June 19, 1865, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln in January 1863 amid the Civil War. Texas was the last state to see these troops.
“Oh, it was like Christmas, but when we moved to Fort Worth, not so much,” Lee said.
Lee went on to meet a woman named Lenora Rolla, who gathered materials illustrating how Black people had contributed to the growth of Fort Worth. Rolla’s efforts later founded the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society, and Lee became one of its first members.
The Historical and Genealogical Society helped organize Fort Worth’s revival Juneteenth program in 1975. More than 30,000 people attended the celebration at Sycamore Park throughout a three-day period, Lee said.
“We knew when they pulled the plug at 10 o’clock, we were supposed to go home,” Lee laughed. “But this particular time, I got on the flat bunk, the flat big truck, and pushed that thing back in and we partied till dawn.”
The work to be nationally recognized began decades later when Lee was 89 and had decided to make a 1,400-mile walk to Washington, D.C.
“I had four children, they were up, out and grown. I taught school. I had helped with the food bank, and the farm, and it just dawned on me that maybe, there was something else I needed to do,” Lee said, crediting the start of the initiative to Dr. Ronald Myers, who had advocated for over 40 states to observe Juneteenth.
“I gathered some people at my church, my pastor, the musicians, the county commissioners, school board members and they gave me the send off,” Lee said. “I started walking from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. … I just knew somebody would notice a little old lady in tennis shoes, and they did.”
Lee crossed several Texas cities before she was offered an RV to rest in, but the people who offered said she was “too political.” After that, Lee and her team decided she would only travel to where she was invited and where there were Juneteenth services, including Denver, Colorado Springs, St. Louis, Chicago, Atlanta and the Carolinas to name a few.
She left Fort Worth in September 2016 and found herself in Washington in January 2017. With her, Lee brought an online petition, which was shared by rapper and producer P. Diddy and had gathered over 1.5 million signatures.
She relaunched the campaign in 2019, crossing over seven states before COVID-19 cut the trip short. And finally, in June 2021, President Joe Biden signed a federal bill that nationally recognized the holiday. Lee was in attendance.
“My granddaughter, Dione, got the call that we were to go to the White House and we were there the next day,” Lee said. “I had been to the White House before … but the Oval Office? And to see that many representatives, and senators, and the president, and the vice president, I mean, it was awe-inspiring.”
The Grandmother of Juneteenth said she was prepared to gather double the signatures if she had to, but the campaign also caused another realization.
“We realized if we got that many more signatures, 3 million signatures, we could turn this country around, and I still believe it can be turned around,” Lee said. “I still believe people will come together to realize that if we don’t, our civilization will disappear like ancient civilizations have done. We’ve got to get the message and work together.”
In her time in the Oval Office, Biden also whispered something in Lee’s ear.
“Everybody wants to know what he said, and I say, ‘I’m keeping something to myself. I’m not telling y’all,’” Lee said, adding that he wrote her a check for $6.19, to symbolize the date of the Juneteenth holiday, as one of the first contributions toward the new Juneteenth museum that’s expected to be completed in Fort Worth by 2025.
Advice to the future generations
After 95 years, Opal Lee has learned many things in her lifetime.
One was she does not like yams — at all. Another was that neighbors have to look out for each other. And one of the most important things Lee has learned is that real change comes from seeing each other as brothers and sisters, and that true change can’t be implemented if we’re divided.
When Lee was working at a school in east Fort Worth, an irate father came to the campus and threatened to kill the principal over a small incident. The principal, who was afraid, sent the father to Lee, who sat at a small desk in the library and after a conversation, was able to deescalate the situation and send the man home.
“In my neighborhood, I’d come across people who had been drinking, or frustrated about something, or even mentally ill. We knew in our neighborhood how to address those things, and we did. We didn’t have to call the police,” Lee said. “Lord knows if we called them and they had killed somebody, I don’t know how we would have been able to live with it. But we knew our neighbors, we knew who had a child, or a grown-up who needed special attention and we knew how to handle it.”
That’s changed in recent generations, she said.
“Old people understand that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. Olds understand that somewhere along the line, scientists tell us that some of us got too close to the sun, and some of us didn’t and we’re brothers and sisters under the skin,” Lee said.
Now, we’re too focused on division, Lee said, although she believes most people want similar basic things: to have a family and to raise their children safely.
“If [the youth] thinks about the kinds of things that I went through in my lifetime, even in my grandparents’ and my mother’s time, if they had to go through that, what would they do?” Lee said. “They should be about the business of changing what’s going on. They should be about the business of helping to find housing for homeless people, that activism has ought to take a weight to help others and they can.”
And that also means, sometimes protesting isn’t enough, Lee said.
“I say over and over again, make yourself a committee of one. We know the people who are not on the same page, change their minds,” the 95-year-old continued. “Know that their minds can be changed. People can be taught to hate. They can be taught to love.”
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