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Opal Lee brings voting rights play to Fort Worth ahead of election

Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, speaks to participants in front of African American Museum in Fair Park after they finished walking in 2024 Opal's Walk for Freedom honoring the U.S. federal holiday, Juneteenth, Wednesday, June 19, 2024, in Dallas.
Chitose Suzuki
/
The Dallas Morning News
Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, speaks to participants in front of African American Museum in Fair Park after they finished walking in 2024 Opal's Walk for Freedom honoring the U.S. federal holiday, Juneteenth, Wednesday, June 19, 2024, in Dallas.

Sixty years ago, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave a searing testimony about voter suppression before the credentials committee of the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Two days before the Nov. 5 election, Opal Lee will bring a play to Fort Worth that pays tribute to Hamer’s legacy as a voting rights advocate, according to a news release.

The production will be held at I.M. Terrell, Lee’s alma mater and the city’s first school for Black students when it opened in 1882. It will be followed by a panel discussion about Tarrant County candidates running for office.

Lee, a Fort Worth native, recently saw an excerpt of Mzuri Moyo Aimbaye’s The Fannie Lou Hamer Story, Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired in Atlanta and wanted the play to be shown locally, according to an email from her granddaughter, Dione Sims.

Sims, the founder and president of Unity Unlimited, which is co-producing the Fort Worth performance, said her grandmother hopes it will inspire people to vote. Aimbaye’s nonprofit, Healing Through the Sound of Music, is the other producer.

Lee, 98, is known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth” because she campaigned to make the date a federal holiday. Juneteenth commemorates the day when Union troops informed enslaved people in Galveston of their freedom, nearly two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by Abraham Lincoln.

Also in her 1964 speech, Hamer spoke about the retaliation she faced for her voting activism, which included being fired from her job as a sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation. She also recounted being arrested on her way back from a voter education workshop and later beaten in jail.

“Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?” Hamer asked the committee.

This is not the first time that a play about Hamer will be presented in the D-FW area. Earlier this year, Dallas Theater Center and Bishop Arts Theatre Center co-produced Fannie: The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer.

Details

3 p.m. Nov. 3 at I.M. Terrell Performing Arts Center, 1411 I.M. Terrell Circle, Fort Worth, 76102. Tickets start at $25.

Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.

This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, The University of Texas at Dallas, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.

Uwa is the breaking features reporter at The Dallas Morning News. She previously reported for NBC News Digital and wrote for Slate. She also has work published in Vulture and Time Out.