Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, visits Lawton

“The Fourth of July freed the land, but Juneteenth freed the people,” Opal Lee, the Grandmother of Juneteenth, said.

Lee was invited to Lawton Wednesday to share her story to the community. She is responsible for establishing the federal holiday that grants everyone freedom.

Lee was born in Marshall, Texas, as the oldest of three. Her parents met in high school in Marshall. After her father married her mother and built her a house, he left for Fort Worth to find work during the Great Depression.

“He was gonna send for us, but he never got around to it,” Lee said.

Lee said they lost the house her dad built in a fire. Her mother had to sell everything to move them to Fort Worth.

“I don’t think my dad knew we were coming,” Lee said. “We were living in what were called server quarters behind this three-story building that was a medical library. It was in a neighborhood where there was a black school that had been built on a city dump for black children. That’s where I went to school for about six weeks.”

Her parents got moved to the Southside of Fort Worth where she finished high school at 16 years old. Her mom wanted to send her to Wiley University in Marshall, but Lee wanted to get married.

“I was married four years and [had] four babies when it dawned on me, I was gonna have to raise my husband too,” Lee said.

Lee said when she left her husband, she wanted to go to college.

“I went to Wiley without a dime and they put me to work in the college bookstore,” Lee said.

She was working two jobs to stay in college and graduated in 3 1/2 years.

“I went back to Fort Worth, got a job teaching school,” Lee said. “They paid $2,000 a year, I couldn’t feed four children on $2,000. So I got another job. If I was at school from 8-3, there’d be a car waiting for me and I’d clock in [at my other job] from 4-12. I might still be working like that, but they laid people off.”

Lee said she did many other things in her life including helping start a historical society, acquiring a farm and carrying food boxes to others in need.

As far as becoming a political activist or teacher she didn’t have that in mind at all.

“It just sort of snowballed that that was what I could do and would do while I was teaching,” Lee said.

Lee said she’s taught for 40+ years and has been a political activist for 30-40 years.

“I got this urge because I had retired from the school system, I had raised four children,” Lee said. “It dawned on me that Dr. Ronald Meyers had worked untiringly to have Juneteenth made a national holiday, and it hadn’t happened. I thought, ‘If I took up that cause, if I walked from Fort Worth to Washington D.C., 1,400 miles, somebody would notice.’ And they did. If I started in Sept. 2016, I actually got to Washington Jan. 2017.”

Lee said, to her, Juneteenth means one thing: freedom.

“We are a people who crave freedom,” she said. “Freedom means so much to all of us. Until we have freedom, and we don’t have it yet, there are those who understand that our nation has to be one nation.”

“Most people are genuine,” Lee said. “Most people want freedom and we’re not free yet. There are homeless people, jobless people, people who can’t get insurance, climate change, all these things. We need to work together as Americans. Not Black Americans or White Americans or Italian Americans, we need to be Americans. As soon as we achieve that and we learn to work with each other to get rid of the disparities we have, I’m sure that this is gonna be the best country in the whole wide world.”