Major Civil Rights activist hospitalized in Ohio: ‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’

CINCINNATI, Ohio — Dr. Opal Lee, also known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” is being treated at an Ohio hospital.

The 98-year-old, from Fort Worth, Texas, was in Cincinnati to receive an award when she was hospitalized Sunday, her granddaughter told NBC 5.

Details surrounding her hospitalization were not released, but local news said she would be released from the hospital “soon.”

In 2016, at age 89, the retired schoolteacher and longtime community activist took up the cause of elevating Juneteenth as a federal holiday. And she succeeded.

The federal holiday commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, signed earlier by President Abraham Lincoln, which freed enslaved people. After the U.S. Civil War ended, Texas was the last former Confederate state to recognize emancipation.

Lee began a walking campaign in 2016, which took her from Fort Worth to other cities en route to her destination: the city of Washington D.C. Over a span of several weeks, she appeared in cities where she had been invited to speak. Afterward, she would always walk the first two and a half miles toward her next stopping point. The distance referenced the number of years that it took for enslaved people in Texas to learn they were free.

“I was thinking that surely, somebody would see a little old lady in tennis shoes trying to get to Congress and notice,” she told CNN at the time.

Juneteenth was officially recognized as a federal holiday in the United States on June 17, 2021, when President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.