AUSTIN, Texas (RNS) — In 2016, 89-year-old Opal Lee walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in hopes of establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. Partly due to her efforts, it became one in 2021.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when the nation’s last enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom. The news arrived over two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
But for “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” the holiday carries a grief more personal than for most living today. When she was 12 years old, her family moved into a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. Shortly after, on June 19, 1939, a mob of over 500 white residents burned the family’s home down…