06/20/2026
From our friends at A Mighty Girl
Today, Americans mark Juneteenth, the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when news of freedom finally reached the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas. "We celebrate 160 years of freedom for the enslaved human beings who weren't even considered people when the Declaration of Independence was signed," declared Opal Lee on last year's anniversary -- the retired Fort Worth schoolteacher known as the Grandmother of Juneteenth, who did more than anyone to make this day a national holiday.
In 2016, at the age of eighty-nine, Lee set out to walk from her home in Texas to Washington, D.C. She covered two and a half miles at a time -- one for each of the years that freedom was withheld from the people of Galveston, after the Emancipation Proclamation -- and as she went, she gathered more than a million signatures urging Congress to recognize the day. "I decided that maybe if a little old lady, eighty-nine years old, in tennis shoes walking from Fort Worth to Washington, somebody would pay attention," she said. Somebody did.
On June 17, 2021, Juneteenth became a federal holiday -- the first new one since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983 -- and Opal Lee, then ninety-four, stood among those gathered at the White House as President Biden signed it into law. He called it one of the greatest honors of his presidency, and the room rose to give her a standing ovation.
For Opal Lee, June 19 had once meant something very different. On that day in 1939, a mob of some five hundred White people gathered outside the Fort Worth house her parents had bought only days before, in a neighborhood that did not want a Black family in it. Twelve-year-old Opal and her siblings were sent to a friend's house a few blocks away; her parents fled after dark. The mob tore the house apart, dragged the furniture into the street, and burned it, while the police stood by and watched. Her parents never spoke of it again.
Lee went on to become a teacher and a counselor in Fort Worth, ran a food bank and a community farm, and spent decades helping the families around her. The mob had come for her family on June 19. She spent the rest of her life turning it into a day of freedom for everyone.
Now ninety-nine, the Grandmother of Juneteenth puts it simply: "We can get so much more done together than apart."
For an inspiring picture book about Opal Lee's fight to make Juneteenth a national holiday, we highly recommend "Opal Lee and What It Means to Be Free" for ages 5 and up at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781400231256 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4ev1qh3 (Amazon)
She has told her story for adult readers in a new memoir "A Committee of One" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780063459014 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4oDQqmc (Amazon)
There is also a new graphic novel about her life for ages 10 and up "First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781637157770 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3SlFcqD (Amazon)
Opal Lee is one of the newest addition to the Inspiring Women Doll series for ages 6 and up at https://amzn.to/4gqA4eM
For books for children and teens about more pioneering African American women, visit our blog post "99 Books about Extraordinary Black Mighty Girls and Women" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14276
You can also find books about courageous women who fought for equality as part of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in our blog post "50 Inspiring Books on Girls & Women of the Civil Rights Movement," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=11177
Thanks to The King Center for sharing this image!
