Before she would be known as the “grandmother of Juneteenth,” the day meant something different to Opal Lee, when she and her family fled their home in darkness in hope of surviving the racist mob that had come for them.
Police stood by as the White mob wielding baseball bats gathered outside for a raid on June 19, 1939, and forced Lee, then 12, and her family from the Fort Worth home they had just moved into the day before — breaking the windows with stones, smashing the furniture, burning their belongings. The event was traumatic for Lee, now a 97-year-old civil rights activist known for her tireless efforts to turn Juneteenth, the day commemorating Black freedom from slavery, into a national holiday.
“The fact that it happened on the 19th day of June has spurred me to make people understand that Juneteenth is not just a festival,” she told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2021.
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Now, more than 84 years after the racist mob forced her from her home, Lee has been given back the land where her house once stood. And Trinity Habitat for Humanity has gone one step further: A house is being built for Lee and expected to be completed sometime in 2024.
Gage Yager, chief executive of Trinity Habitat for Humanity, said he got a phone call from Lee inquiring about buying what was her family’s land.
“She’s like, ‘You guys own my lot at 940 East Annie,’” Yager said. “She told me briefly: ‘I used to live on that lot and people chased us out and burned the house down. I would love to buy the lot from you.’
“I said: ‘Well, Opal, we won’t sell it to you. We’ll give it to you.’”
WFAA, an ABC affiliate in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, was the first to report the story.
Lee garnered national attention in 2016 when she walked 1,400 miles from her home in Fort Worth to D.C., hoping to ask President Barack Obama to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Her efforts paid off in 2021, when President Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery. Lee, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
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Lee’s father, Otis Flake, left East Texas during the Great Depression and headed to Fort Worth to find work, Lee told Texas Monthly in June. Flake, a railroad employee, moved his family into a home on East Annie Street on June 18, 1939.
“It was going to be the nicest place we had in Fort Worth,” Lee told WFAA. “We were so proud of it.”
Although the real estate agent who sold Lee the home assured him that there would be “no trouble about it” in the neighborhood, that was not the case. Local residents had tried to keep homeowners from being able to sell property to Black people. A neighbor on Annie Street said that “he advised the Negroes to move out, telling them the community wished them no trouble,” according to the Star-Telegram.
Hours after they moved in, Lee’s mother said, two men came to the house and ordered them to move, the Star-Telegram reported at the time. Later that night, two men driving by in a car barked out similarly intimidating instruction: “You’re here tonight, but you’ll be moved out tomorrow night.”
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The police were no help.
“When my dad came home from work with a gun, police told him, ‘If you bust a cap, we’ll let the mob have you,’” Lee recalled to Texas Monthly.
The men who had come by the house to intimidate the Black family were right. After the family fled to their friends’ home several blocks away, the mob raided the house and destroyed everything in sight. A man walking past the crowd on his way home from the store was injured when one of the rioters hit him in the chest with a baseball bat.
“We were frightened to death when our parents sent us away from the house,” Lee told WFAA. “To come back later to see it in shambles, that was traumatic.”
When her family had to buy another home, neither Lee nor her parents discussed what happened.
Yager, who had known Lee since she was a member of Trinity Habitat’s founding board, had no idea what had happened to his friend at the property more than 80 years ago.
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“She didn’t wear that on her sleeve or talk about it,” he said.
After Lee called Yager about buying the property, the CEO said he looked into it and realized there were no immediate plans for the land. He offered to give her the land in exchange for $10 to make the deal legally binding.
“It should be hers, and there should be something good to come out of something terrible all those years ago,” Yager said.
When Yager offered to build a home for her on the property, the news overwhelmed Lee.
“I could have done a holy dance, I tell you,” Lee told WFAA.
Trinity Habitat for Humanity, an affiliate of Habitat for Humanity, broke ground on the project in September and is looking forward to getting Lee’s house built in the next year, Yager said. He said he is thrilled that he can help work with his friend to give her the happy ending she deserves — and finally close the book on one of the worst chapters of her life.
“It’s both an amazing and terrible story, and hopefully, as she says, it comes full circle,” Yager said. “We’ll build a home, laugh, cry and move her in. And we’ll celebrate the moment when that happens.”
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