Opal Lee, the civil rights activist whose crusade helped to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, celebrated her 98th birthday this week.
She helped organize one of the first major celebrations in her hometown of Fort Worth, and Texas became the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday in 1980. Then she collected more than a million signatures to make it a federally-recognized holiday; being onsite when President Joe Biden declared it so in 2021.
Her efforts led to her being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 and her being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in May 2024.
Opal Lee, ‘grandmother of Juneteenth,’ has questions for Indianapolis
When Lee was in Indianapolis for a convention last summer, she also was on a mission to find information about her mother’s time in the city; more specifically the family that brought her to Indiana.
Lee’s mother, Mattie Flake, had agreed to work for a local family in exchange for their help in getting her son out of a New York mental health facility and back to Texas with her, Lee said.