‘It Should Be Hers’: Juneteenth Advocate, Opal Lee Reclaims Land 84 Years After White Mob Destroyed Texas Home

A 97-year-old Texas woman known for her pivotal role in making Juneteenth a federal holiday has been given back the land in Fort Worth, where her family home was destroyed by a racist mob in 1939.

Opal Lee, who became known as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth” after she walked 1,400 miles from her Texas home to Washington, D.C., in 2016 to advocate for Juneteenth, was 12 years old when a horde of racist whites forced her family to flee their newly built home 84 years ago.

The violent mob, armed with baseball bats, ransacked the home, smashed all the windows, broke up the furniture, and set fire to the family’s clothes and valuables.

uneteenth Advocate, Opal Lee Reclaims Land 84 Years After White Mob Destroyed Texas Home
Opal Lee speaks during a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 13, 2023. (Photo by Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Local law enforcement connived in allowing the mob to attack the family the day after they moved in, marking a dark and indelible chapter in Lee’s early life that continues to inspire her efforts to raise awareness about the true meaning of Juneteenth.

“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.

More than eight decades after the crushing loss, Trinity Habitat for Humanity is constructing a brand-new home for Lee on the very land where her family’s livelihood was reduced to rubble many decades earlier.

Her new home is expected to be completed in the coming months.

Gage Yager, CEO of Trinity Habitat for Humanity, an affiliate of the national nonprofit, said Lee called him recently to ask about buying her family’s land back.

“She’s like, ‘You guys own my lot at 940 East Annie,’” Yager recalled, according to ABC affiliate WFAA in Dallas-Fort Worth. “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.’”

Yager and Lee had known each other for some time as both serve as members of Trinity Habitat’s founding board, but Yager said he was clueless about what happened to his colleague more than 80 years ago.

“She didn’t wear that on her sleeve or talk about it,” he said.

Yager said he checked the deeds on the land and found no immediate claims to it, allowing him to give Lee the land for a symbolic fee of $10 to make the deal official.

“It should be hers, and there should be something good to come out of something terrible all those years ago,” Yager said.

Yager’s act of kindness went further when he offered to build a new home on the property, which overwhelmed Lee emotionally.

“I could have done a holy dance, I tell you,” Lee told WFAA.

Construction on Lee’s new home began in September, with Yager expressing hope that Lee finds peace with the tragic episode during the final chapter 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.”

Lee made national headlines more than seven years ago when she walked from Texas to Washington in hopes of getting the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, to create a federal holiday for Juneteenth. 

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday to commemorate the emancipation of the last enslaved Black Americans in Texas following the end of the Civil War.

Lee was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her major role in helping Juneteenth become a national holiday.

The unprovoked attack on her family’s home in 1939 underscored the grave dangers Black Americans faced during the Jim Crow era of racial segregation and violent discrimination, including lynchings in many Southern states.

Lee’s father, Otis Flake — a rail industry employee from East Texas — was looking for a new job when he packed the family up and moved to Fort Worth during the final year of the Great Depression. 

On June 18, 1939, the family settled into a house on East Annie Street in Fort Worth, Lee told Texas Monthly last June.

“It was going to be the nicest place we had in Fort Worth,” Lee told WFAA. “We were so proud of it.”

The real estate agent who sold Flake the home reassured him that there wouldn’t be any racial issues in the progressive town, however, a different reality unfolded.

Prior to the family’s arrival, whites who lived on East Annie Street had publicly opposed property sales to Black people, with Flake and his family walking unwittingly into a racially charged environment.

Before the family could get settled, a neighbor stopped by and advised Flake to pack his bags, saying Black people were not allowed to live there and warning that “the community wished them no trouble,” the Star-Telegram reported at the time.

Hours later, two white men from the neighborhood audaciously barged through the front door in an attempt to intimidate Flake and force the family to leave immediately. 

Next, a car skidded outside the family home overnight, with a voice threatening: “You’re here tonight, but you’ll be moved out tomorrow night.”

Making matters worse, local law enforcement refused to intervene and protect the family.

“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 told Texas Monthly.

Facing threats from every angle, the family fled to a friend’s house as a mob of about 500 pounced and annihilated the property as police stood by.

A Black man walking by the siege was attacked with a baseball bat, according to official accounts of what happened.

“We were frightened to death when our parents sent us away from the house,” Lee told WFAA decades later. “To come back later to see it in shambles, that was traumatic.”

In the years that followed, the family attempted to put the traumatic episode behind them by never discussing it again.

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