As Opal Lee celebrates her 99th birthday Oct. 7, the Grandmother of Juneteenth said she is feeling better than ever following her hospitalization this summer.
“I’m alive and kicking,” she said over the phone.
Lee was hospitalized in late May for unknown reasons while on a trip to receive the International Freedom Conductor Award at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Ohio. Lee was released from the hospital in early June and had to miss out on her annual Juneteenth walk as she recovered at her Fort Worth home.
Even though she’s been out of the spotlight, Lee spends her Sundays at Baker Chapel AME Church where she serves as a deaconess. Congregants gathered there Oct. 5 to throw her an early birthday party, which featured gifts, a celebratory video montage and dance performances.
“I was surprised and thankful that they remember an old lady nearly 100 years old,” Lee said.
Dione Sims said her grandmother is getting “stronger and better,” although the matriarch misses interacting with people on a daily basis.
“She was used to running to fix everybody’s problems,” Sims said. “The world still spins around even without her spinning on its axis.”
The family plans an intimate birthday celebration today, Sims added.
Lee spent decades advocating for Juneteenth to become a national holiday. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed it into law, commemorating the day that Union soldiers rode to Galveston to inform enslaved Texans that they were free, approximately 2.5 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1926, Lee was born in Marshall. Her father moved to Fort Worth during the Great Depression to find work. Eventually, Lee’s mother and siblings followed.
When Lee was 12, her family moved into a predominantly white neighborhood. On June 19, 1939, a racist mob of 500 people forced the family out of the home. She went on to attend I.M. Terrell High School, the first public school for Black students in Fort Worth.
Lee returns to the public eye Oct. 11 for the sold-out Fort Worth/Tarrant County NAACP 48th Annual Freedom Fund Celebration at I.M. Terrell Academy for STEM and VPA.
The local NAACP will premiere a documentary spotlighting eight area civil rights leaders: Lee, Lorraine C. Miller, Mattie Peterson Compton, Rev. Floyd Moody, Norma Roby, Estella Williams, Judge Louis Sturns and the late Judge L. Clifford Davis.
As Lee celebrates the latest milestone, she acknowledges the challenges she’s overcome in life but expresses gratitude for all she’s accomplished.
“It hasn’t always been sweet, but I survived it and I’m grateful,” Lee said. “I want the youngsters to know that they can make it too. It’s not going to be all smooth, but we have to take the bitter with the sweet.”
David Moreno is the arts and culture reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at david.moreno@fortworthreport.org or @davidmreports.
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