A Guest Post by Corinna Wood
This Thursday June 19th, 98 year old Opal Lee will embark on her annual 2.5 mile walk to recognize the 2.5 years it took for the news of freedom to reach the enslaved people in Texas.
Hers is a story of what a woman with a vision can accomplish.
As a young girl living in Fort Worth Texas, she experienced the trauma of white rioters barging into her family’s home and burned it to the ground.
As she grew older and had children of her own, Opal Lee became a community activist and later a school teacher and counselor. At 89 years old, she took up the cause of elevating to a federal holiday Juneteenth—celebrated by African Americans since the late 1800s.
Juneteenth is the anniversary of June 19, 1865 when Union soldiers came to Galveston, TX to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved people. That was the last state in the U.S. to end slavery.
In 2016, Opal Lee, 89, walked towards Washington, DC, giving talks and speeches along the way. She would go from one city to the next, and in each city would walk 2 ½ miles to commemorate the 2 ½ years it took for the enslaved people of Texas to learn that they were free.
“I was thinking that surely, somebody would see a little old lady in tennis shoes trying to get to Congress and notice,” she told the television network CNN.
For the next four years, her walk became an annual campaign, until in June 2021 when President Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
This year Ms. Opal Lee is inviting you to walk 2.5 miles with her, wherever you may be – through your neighborhood or town, on a treadmill or a local track. To learn more, see this website on Opal’s virtual walk.
Opal’s story reminds us that it’s never too late for women to make change in the world.
In sisterhood,
Corinna Wood
Holistic Women’s Wisdom
