In the heat of a Texas June, before the morning sun crests the roofs of Fort Worth, a crowd will gather at Farrington Field. At the front, a woman in white sneakers and a steady stride will lead the way — 98-year-old Opal Lee, the Fort Worth activist whose years of walking, lobbying, and educating helped push Juneteenth into the national consciousness and, in 2021, onto the federal calendar.
This year’s Opal’s Walk for Freedom, a 2.5-mile route symbolizing the two and a half years it took for news of emancipation to reach the enslaved people of Texas, begins at 9 a.m. on Thursday, June 19. It’s more than just a ceremonial march — it’s the heartbeat of a city that has, over the last few years, found itself at the center of the national Juneteenth conversation.
The story of Juneteenth — named for the day Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston in 1865 to declare the end of slavery — is inextricably tied to Texas. Though the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect more than two years earlier, enforcement in the remote Confederate state lagged until Union troops finally landed on the Gulf Coast. Granger’s General Order No. 3 informed Texans that “all slaves are free,” and that their new relationship would be “that between employer and hired labor.”…