Opal Lee, the civil rights activist whose crusade helped to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, celebrated her 98th birthday this week.
She helped organize one of the first major celebrations in her hometown of Fort Worth, and Texas became the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday in 1980. Then she collected more than a million signatures to make it a federally-recognized holiday; being onsite when President Joe Biden declared it so in 2021.
Her efforts led to her being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 and her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 2024.
Opal Lee, ‘grandmother of Juneteenth,’ has questions for Indianapolis
When Lee was in Indianapolis for a convention last summer, she also was on a mission to find information about her mother’s time in the city; more specifically the family that brought her to Indiana.
Lee’s mother, Mattie Flake, had agreed to work for a local family in exchange for their help in getting her son out of a New York mental health facility and back to Texas with her, Lee said.
“She was recruited from Texas to come here because she was an excellent cook. She came to work for a family. She lived in service. She chose to do that because the gentleman who recruited her assured her she’d be able to get her son, my brother, from Pilgrim State Hospital for the mentally ill,” Lee said. “He’d been there for a while. He served time in the army and ended up at Pilgrim State Hospital. My mother thought she could get him home and that would be the best place for him.
“She had been assured that someone in Indianapolis could get him out of the hospital.”
Lee, the eldest of three children, said her mother had been in Indianapolis for about seven or eight years. Lee was a young woman and had visited her mom in Indy.
Lee’s brother was released from the hospital, but the release was unrelated to the arrangement her mother had with the local family.
Today, Lee still seeks information about the family that recruited her mother to Indianapolis. Lee knows only that the family was a prominent one within the Disciples of Christ denomination.
“For the life of me I couldn’t think of the family’s name,” she said.
When in Indianapolis in July 2024, Lee contacted Bethel A.M.E. Church, which confirmed that Flake had been a member and worked with the youth program. But the church didn’t start keeping official records until the 1960s and her mother was already back in Texas by that time.
Opal Lee championed Juneteenth holiday:At 95, she’s still got work to do.
National Juneteenth Museum in the works
A retired teacher, Lee was born Oct. 7, 1926, in Marshall, Texas. Her family moved to Forth Worth when she was 10 years old. When she was 12, her family’s home in the Terrell Heights area was burned down by a white mob on June 19, 1939.
Her annual two-and-a-half-mile walks, as well as a symbolic 2016 walk from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., brought attention to the Juneteenth holiday, but Lee also has efforts to address hunger, housing insecurity, education and economic inequality as part of a number of organizations. One of them is building the National Juneteenth Museum, to open in Fort Worth in 2026.
Opal Lee is riding for Kamala Harris
This summer marked Lee’s first return to Indianapolis since her mother lived in the city.
Lee was front and center in July when Vice President Kamala Harris made her first public presentation after President Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as the Democratic Party candidate for the presidency.
And she was thrilled.
“Women have always been able to lead, behind the scenes always working with their husbands and brothers and sons, doing the things that need to be done. We’ve been doing it for years. So it would behoove us to have a woman get us out of the quagmire that we’re in,” Lee said. “We’re in a mess. It’s not the president’s fault. It’s just the way the system is. I believe if we have a woman president it will change.
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“I’ve met her more than once. It’s like old friends that you discuss things with and you hope there’ll be changes. Just think; she’ll have the power to make the changes!” she said. “I’m elated!”
Lee also appeared at several events during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
What is Juneteenth?
Juneteenth – also called Emancipation Day, Freedom Day or Jubilee Day – symbolizes the end of slavery, though it was not abolished until the 13th Amendment. The holiday commemorates the day in 1865 that Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger delivered the news of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to people in Galveston, Texas.
Juneteenth by any other name in Brown County, Indiana
The Brown County commissioners had been resistant to calling the county’s new June 19 holiday Juneteenth, and in September considered “Old Settlersteenth,” before naming the the holiday “Brown County Employee Appreciation Day.” It reversed that decision last week.
Contact IndyStar reporter Cheryl V. Jackson at cheryl.jackson@indystar.com or 317-444-6264. Follow her on X.com: @cherylvjackson.