On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law, establishing June 19 as the twelfth federal holiday in the United States. Standing directly behind him as he signed was Opal Lee, a ninety-four-year-old retired schoolteacher from Fort Worth, Texas, whose single-handed campaign had produced the bill she was watching become law.
Lee's project began in 2016, when she was eighty-nine. She set out to walk from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C. — approximately fourteen hundred miles — walking two and a half miles each day (the distance from the Galveston location where the last enslaved people in Texas learned of emancipation on June 19, 1865, to the nearest Union headquarters). She intended the walk as a symbolic petition for federal recognition of Juneteenth.
The walk became an organizing campaign. Over the next five years, Lee collected more than 1.5 million petition signatures, testified before Congress, appeared on virtually every major American news program, and was personally credited by the bill's sponsors — including Senators Edward Markey and John Cornyn — as the reason the legislation reached a vote.
Lee remained active after the bill's passage. She is the co-founder of the National Juneteenth Museum in Fort Worth, which broke ground in 2023 and is scheduled to open to the public in late 2026. She has continued to walk the two-and-a-half-mile route in Fort Worth each Juneteenth. She is, by her own description, "a little old lady in tennis shoes." The record suggests otherwise.
