Opal Lee’s – On May 3, 2024, Opal Lee—known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth”—received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This Juneteenth marks 161 years since enslaved people were told they were free in Galveston, Texas, and it traces how Lee’s long campaign helped push
On May 3, 2024, Opal Lee stood in the spotlight as she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. For a woman who is now nearly 100 years old, the recognition felt less like a finish line and more like a promise she’d been chasing for decades.
Fort Worth, Texas is where the next chapter plays out. This Juneteenth marks 161 years since the day the last group of enslaved people found out they had been freed in Galveston. Texas. The proclamation followed Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 by more than two years. Juneteenth didn’t become a federal holiday until 2021—and Lee. 99. has spent her life making sure the delay. the dignity. and the lessons behind it never disappear.
Lee is celebrating this year by sharing the story of her activism in “A Committee of One,” released by Amistad. Part memoir and part self-help, the book reads like advice from a grandmother who believes survival is a kind of instruction.
“There are those who’ve gone before us, those who have taken that time to pass things on to us in a manner that we learn and so it’s our responsibility to see that others learn from us,” Lee said. “We have to take our time with them. It’s as simple as that.”
Her campaign wasn’t born from a single speech or a single day—it grew out of celebrations she remembers as a child and out of violence that made celebration feel dangerous. In “A Committee of One. ” Lee writes that Juneteenth was an annual anticipation growing up. with food-filled gatherings with neighbors and games like jump rope and ball games.
“We ate everything that wasn’t nailed down,” Lee said.
Then the memories turn. When Lee was 12, a racist mob destroyed her family’s house and all their belongings. Her parents had “worked tirelessly to buy” the home, and they did it in a predominantly white neighborhood. In her memoir. Lee recalls feeling numb as her father told her to grab what she could and run out of the house.
“At 12 years old, I got one of my first lessons on the evils of this injustice in the world,” she writes. “I’d spend the next 85 years doing everything I could to highlight the good I still believe exists in this world.”
That mixture of grief and resolve became the blueprint for everything that followed. In 2023, Habitat for Humanity gifted her the childhood land back and built a home on it. She still lives there today.
For years, Lee used her time in the places where need was immediate. As a “visiting teacher,” she helped students in need access food, housing and clothing. She ran a food pantry and a community farm that employed previously incarcerated people. In her memoir. she describes this as “laying the foundation for the work that would come later” with her Juneteenth awareness campaign.
She also encountered a painful discovery inside her own mission: she says she was shocked to learn that it was primarily Black Texans who celebrated the holiday.
The turning point. she says. was not just about recognition—it was about closing the long gap between when freedom happened and when it was fully acknowledged. In 2016. when she was 89. Lee walked 2.5 miles a day from Fort Worth to Washington. DC. a symbolic representation of the two-and-a-half-year delay between the Emancipation Proclamation era and the day enslaved people in Galveston were told they were free. In 2020, her petition reached over 1.6 million signatures.
Then the law moved.
When President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act in 2021, Lee visited the White House. She remembers the moment as a “precious day.”
Today, she keeps the rhythm alive in a smaller, more local way. Lee celebrates this year by taking that symbolic 2.5-mile walk by car in her native Fort Worth, Texas. Participants will walk by her side there, and host their own walks in cities including Cincinnati, Honolulu and Los Angeles.
“Juneteenth is so much more than what we envision it,” Lee said. Promise Roland, Lee’s granddaughter, who sits in on the conversation, adds there’s a misconception that the holiday is only for Black Americans or Texans.
Lee’s monthlong Juneteenth practice is laid out in “A Committee of One.” She starts the morning with a “breakfast of prayer. ” calling “for unity in our nation.” She celebrates with the Miss Juneteenth pageant and a three-day festival that includes a film festival. cook-off. college recruitment fairs. fireworks. music and educational seminars.
And then there is the daily meaning she keeps returning to. She calls freedom a “daily practice” of kindness, advocacy, helping your community and joy.
“None of us are free until we’re all free,” Lee previously told USA TODAY in 2022.
This time, she frames it as a responsibility that extends beyond any one day.
“When I practice freedom, I tell you, it’s for everybody and it means that we should in every way possible share the things we know, things we do with other people, with other youngsters,” Lee said. “Help them learn that there’s more to life than just their little pond that they’re swimming in.”
Even as she prepares to celebrate her centennial in October. Lee is still pushing for a bigger shape to the calendar. She believes Juneteenth should extend from June 19 through the Fourth of July. so the two holidays can “stand tall” side by side. “not as a replacement. but as a reckoning. a completion of the freedom story.”.
The stakes, for Lee, are never only historical. The work is still living in the way people remember, teach, and choose—long after the walk ends and long after the proclamation date passes.
Opal Lee Grandmother of Juneteenth Juneteenth federal holiday Presidential Medal of Freedom Joe Biden Emancipation Proclamation Amistad A Committee of One Habitat for Humanity Fort Worth 2.5-mile walk