At 98, the Grandmother of Juneteenth Still Has Work to Do

The modest houses look like those one might see lining middle-class neighborhoods in any American city. Lawns fade from lush green to light brown. Signs dot the yards: local ballot measures or county commissioner races. At the top of the block, on East Annie Street in the Historic Southside neighborhood of Fort Worth, sits a house that looks well loved, its front yard surrounded by a wrought iron fence and lined with shrubbery. This is where Opal Lee’s childhood home once burned.

Her parents had worked hard to purchase the land and the house upon it. They had moved here from Marshall, in East Texas, her father hoping to find a steady job in the city during the Great Depression. Then, on the night of June 19, 1939, when Lee was twelve years old, a white mob gathered, demanding that the fam