Opal Lee has worn many hats over nearly a century: mother, grandmother, teacher, activist. But the title that sticks is the one she earned through sheer determination: the Grandmother of Juneteenth. At 99, she’s still the driving force behind the holiday that finally became federal law in 2021, 161 years after the last enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned they were free—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
This Juneteenth, Lee is sharing her story in a new book, “A Committee of One,” out now from Amistad. Part memoir, part self-help guide, it reads like a grandmother’s loving advice, blending wisdom with a call to action. “There are those who’ve gone before us, those who have taken that time to pass things on to us in a manner that we learn,” Lee told USA TODAY. “It’s our responsibility to see that others learn from us. We have to take our time with them. It’s as simple as that.”
Lee’s earliest Juneteenth memories are sweet: food-filled neighborhood celebrations, jump rope, ball games. “We ate everything that wasn’t nailed down,” she recalls with a laugh. But not all memories are joyful. When she was 12, a racist mob destroyed her family’s new home in a predominantly white Fort Worth neighborhood, just four days after they moved in. Her father told her to grab what she could and run. “At 12 years old, I got one of my first lessons on the evils of injustice,” she writes. “I’d spend the next 85 years doing everything I could to highlight the good I still believe exists in this world.”
In 2023, Habitat for Humanity gave her back that childhood land, building her a home where she still lives. That act of restoration mirrors the arc of her life: from trauma to triumph. As a visiting teacher, she helped students access food, housing, and clothing. She ran a food pantry and a community farm that employed formerly incarcerated people. She calls this “laying the foundation for the work that would come later” with her Juneteenth awareness campaign.
In 2016, at age 89, Lee walked 2.5 miles a day from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., symbolizing the two-and-a-half-year delay between the Emancipation Proclamation and the news reaching Galveston. Her petition gathered over 1.6 million signatures. In 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. Lee was at the White House. She remembers it as a “precious day.”
Today, she celebrates by taking that symbolic 2.5-mile walk by car in Fort Worth, with participants joining in cities like Cincinnati, Honolulu, and Los Angeles. “Juneteenth is so much more than what we envision it,” she says. Her granddaughter, Promise Roland, adds that many mistakenly think the holiday is only for Black Americans or Texans. Lee’s monthlong practice includes a “breakfast of prayer” for unity, the Miss Juneteenth pageant, a three-day festival with film, cook-offs, college fairs, fireworks, and educational seminars—and, of course, Opal’s Walk for Freedom.
She calls freedom a “daily practice” of kindness, advocacy, community help, and joy. “None of us are free until we’re all free,” she said in 2022. “When I practice freedom, it’s for everybody. It means sharing what we know with others, helping them learn that there’s more to life than just their little pond.”
Even as she prepares to turn 100 in October, Lee dreams bigger. She envisions Juneteenth stretching from June 19 through the Fourth of July, so the two holidays can “stand tall” side by side—“not as a replacement, but as a reckoning, a completion of the freedom story.”
