Opal Lee: The Dallas Morning News 2021 Texan of the Year

By Dallas Morning News Editorial

When she turned 89, Opal Lee decided she hadn’t done enough.

It was a surprising conclusion coming from a woman who had worked herself through college raising four children in 1950s Texas.

Who became a teacher in the segregated Fort Worth school system making so little she had to take a night job, too, to feed those children.

Who for 50 years has run a food bank that has fed untold thousands.

Who just a few years ago started a farm on the levees of the Trinity River to make sure people in need have fresh vegetables to eat.

A woman whose very life was already a symbol of what it means to live for others.

But that was her feeling. She had to do something more. And people who know Opal Lee know that when she starts, she is not going to stop. So she started walking. And she kept walking. And attention was paid. And she made things change. Again.

In a life that has now marked 95 years in a country where she was born with every disadvantage except for the love and support of her family and her own indomitable determination to live fully for others, Opal Lee has changed her community. She has changed this state. She has changed our country. We are all better because she has been among us. And for that reason, Opal Lee is The Dallas Morning News 2021 Texan of the Year.

A lifelong Texan

Opal Lee’s life began in Marshall in 1926. But her roots in the state stretch a little farther north, to Texarkana. Her family migrated there from Cotton Valley, La., in search of a better life, and it was there that her grandfather, Zachrah Broadus, started a church called Harrison Chapel. Her mother, Mattie Broadus, was one of 19 children, among them three sets of twins, born to her grandmother and grandfather.

Read about all Texan of the Year Finalists

The Rev. Broadus was a man who it seems had a forward-looking sense of life, or at least could be convinced of one. Because when his daughter told him that she wanted to follow her older brother off to Bishop College, the reverend ultimately agreed it was the best thing. But he didn’t agree right away.

This tells us something about Opal Lee. If we need to know from whence her determination springs, we need look no further than her mother. Because when the Rev. Broadus told Mattie no to college, she promised her father she would instead marry Judge Dunbar, who was no judge.

“Judge Dunbar was the doofus in the neighborhood,” Ms. Opal, as most people call her, said, laughing with a mischievous chuckle that she is quick to share. “And I think my grandfather consented rather than let her marry Judge Dunbar. So she was permitted to go to Marshall to school.”

It was a short journey for Mattie. She became ill in Marshall, and her mother and father had to come collect her and bring her home to Texarkana. But in her brief stay she had met a young man there named Otis Flake. And he had fallen in love with her and followed her north, where he asked the reverend if he could have her hand.

The reverend was mischievous, too.

“He asked my dad, ‘Are you sure you want this sick one?’ as if he had some others he could choose from,” Ms. Opal said.

But after Ms. Opal’s grandfather gave consent, that wasn’t the end of it. Her mother had seen a home in Tuskegee, Ala., once when she went there on a 4-H trip. She sat down and drew a picture of it. When the young man had built the house, she would marry him.

He went home saddened but certain.

“She didn’t hear from him for two years,” Ms. Opal said. “And in two years, he came back and said he’d built that house.”

The house was in Marshall, and the young couple moved there to begin their life together. But it wasn’t long before twin struggles struck. The house Mattie had dreamed of burned to the ground, and Otis had to build a little “three-room affair” as Ms. Opal remembered it on the back lot. Otis and Mattie planned to rebuild the house together, but the Great Depression struck and there was no work and no money to be had.

Otis moved to Fort Worth looking for any work he could find. And it’s here in telling the story that Ms. Opal’s voice drops low. She was around 9 or 10 years old when her father left.

“He never got around to sending for us,” she said.

Her mother sold everything they could sell: the cows, the pigeons, whatever was there to get train fare to Fort Worth.

They arrived on a Saturday. By Sunday, her mother was working in somebody’s kitchen. They stayed with the Talley family who were “in service,” meaning they lived in a servant’s house behind the mansion of the people they worked for. The children — Ms. Opal and two brothers included — could make a few pennies here and there helping with chores.

“That was our ice cream money,” she said.

Her father learned they were in Fort Worth, and the family reunited. Their fortune turned on what was some bad luck for her mother. She fell on a city bus and got a small settlement, with the money going toward a down payment on a house at 940 E. Annie St. in the Southside, an area now boxed in by freeways on three sides.

It was a white neighborhood, and the family wasn’t welcome. In a life where prejudice and segregation defined every social experience and every limited opportunity, and where racial violence was a perpetual threat, what happened to the family in 1939 was the most direct assault on Opal Lee’s life yet.

“On the 19th day of June, they gathered,” Ms. Opal said. “The newspaper said it was 500 people strong. The police were there, but the newspaper said the police couldn’t control the mob. When my dad came home from work at the T&P station, the police told him if he busted a cap, they would let the mob have us.”

Her father had a pistol, but he did nothing, could do nothing, while his white neighbors attacked, threw the family’s few possessions on the lawn and burned what they had. The house was destroyed, and the message was clear.

No one would protect them. They had to get out.

A life forever linked

This is the moment in the story to point out that the life of Opal Lee and June 19 will be forever linked. Before it was the date that a white mob attacked her childhood home, it was the day in 1865 that Gen. Gordon Granger issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, announcing to enslaved people that they were free. It was more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

The date has been one of celebration for Black Texans and Black Americans for generations. And Ms. Opal’s memories of that day in her early life in Marshall are good ones.

There was celebrating and dancing and taking part in the freedom that many Black Americans felt and still feel they don’t share with the nation’s Independence Day. Through her life, and despite the terror visited upon her family, Ms. Opal has cherished and shared and spread the love and joy of Juneteenth whenever she could. And it is much to her credit that last year it became the country’s 11th national holiday. She is celebrated now as the grandmother of Juneteenth. And it is what the nation knows of her.

But it is not the whole story; it is indeed only a piece of it. What we see now is the triumph of a journey to national hero and Texas treasure. What we don’t see are the many trials along the path.

Mother, student, teacher

The early years of her childhood were deeply joyful. In Marshall, she barely knew of white people at all. There was a traveling salesman. And there was the family they bought their groceries from. But the idea of race was just not much in her mind at all.

When she moved to Fort Worth, that changed. The struggle and pain and separation of racism were there to face everywhere. Her mother and father were hard workers, but the family still had a hard time making ends meet. Despite that, her mother was determined that her child go to college and offered to send her to Wiley College in Marshall.

Ms. Opal had graduated high school at 16. Her mind was keen, and she was a strong student. But she didn’t go back to Marshall then.

“I got married. Oh, she was so disappointed. She wouldn’t even go to the wedding. Oh, she was disappointed. And it took me four years and four babies to realize that I was gonna have to raise my husband, too,” Ms. Opal said. “So I ended up going home to my mother with four children and having the nerve to say, ‘I’m ready to go to college now.’ ”

Her mother said “she didn’t have no money to send me to nobody’s college.” But she offered to take the children into her home. So it was that during the week, Ms. Opal would take the bus into Marshall, go to class and work. On the weekends she would come home to the children, and to work. She and her mother actually had the same job, as a maid in a nightclub at the Texas Hotel. The managers might have thought they were the same person, they were so invisible then. Her mother would work the job during the week, and Ms. Opal would clock in on the same card on the weekends.

“They knew nobody was complaining the work wasn’t being done,” she said.

Ms. Opal finished college in three and a half years and went home to Fort Worth and took a job teaching. It paid $2,000 a year, not enough to support her children. So she took a second job at the Convair aircraft plant, where she headed each afternoon after she was done teaching.

“If I clocked in at school at eight, I was clocked out by three,” Ms. Opal said. “There was a car waiting for me. I clocked in at Convair at four and was off at 12.”

This went on for years, but she was determined that her children wouldn’t want. They would have two pairs of shoes, one for every day and one for Sunday. And one year, each got a new bicycle at Christmas, not one to share among themselves.

Still, it was a struggle. Though she stayed in debt, she was able to buy a home and give her children things she wanted them to have.

From surviving to giving

For a woman so linked now to the celebration of freedom and dignity of Black Americans, she doesn’t recall being active in the Civil Rights movement during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

“To tell you the truth, I was so busy surviving,” Ms. Opal said. “I knew what was going on, but I wasn’t participating in it. There just wasn’t enough of me to participate.”

Yet the awareness of the effects of racism and segregation marked every aspect of her life. Her work at school exposed her to children who had nothing — nothing decent to wear, nothing good to eat. She moved from teaching to become a home school counselor, going door to door to find out why kids were struggling or why they weren’t in school. She paid careful attention to the hunger and adversity that a society that had totally marginalized Black people was willing to accept. She wasn’t.

After her retirement from the school district in 1977, she joined a group of people who had started a food bank on Yuma Street in an old Jax beer distributing facility. The place burned down, so they moved the food bank into a warehouse on Galvez Street. After nearly a year of paying $4,000 a month in rent, they thought they would have to stop because they couldn’t afford the bill. But then, the owner of the warehouse simply gave them the building, seeing the importance of the work that was being done.

And today if you go to Galvez Street, there it is: the Community Food Bank. Lines of people stream outside, waiting their turn to get what they need to feed their families. It’s a remarkable thing to consider. For the better part of five decades now, Ms. Opal has been devoted to feeding those in need. And this is no small effort. The warehouse on Galvez is a 33,000-square-foot operation that feeds some 500 families each week. Ms. Opal’s home is just around the corner from the warehouse. And on any given day, her doorbell rings nonstop with her family, friends and volunteers coming in and out to help do a hundred different things for needy people. On a recent afternoon, she was personally arranging the transport of boxes of food to homebound people who can’t get to the food bank themselves.

The hustle and bustle all around her doesn’t stop. She can hardly sit down for a few minutes without someone ringing the bell and walking in with some new task they need her input on. She is like the CEO of a corporation. Everyone needs a moment of her time. And everyone gets a kind word and a laugh and then clear instructions, step by step, on what they need to do next.

“Can I show you my farm?” she asks a visitor.

It’s an unexpected offer coming from a woman who lives in the center of Fort Worth and amid the hive of activity that is her home.

Before you know it, she is in the passenger seat of a car, directing the way a few blocks to a dirt road on the dry side of the levees of the Trinity River. And after a few curves along the river’s shape, there it is, Opal’s Farm, the vegetables rising in rows along land the river authority agreed to let her use to grow crops to feed the poor. There are now five acres under cultivation. She has permission to expand to as many as 13.

She loves the place, and she’s beaming with the window rolled down and the sun streaming in, telling how it all got started and how it’s grown. And it’s worth beaming about — land that otherwise would do nothing is instead creating food for those who need it most thanks to this small white-haired woman who is making it happen through the force of her will, the depth of her vision and the breadth of her kindness.

Juneteenth

How did Juneteenth become central to her life, though? It’s a story Ms. Opal delights in. And like so many of her stories, she spreads the credit far and wide. She recalled how in the early 1970s, her friend, Lenora Rolla, was asked to gather information about Black contributions to Fort Worth’s history.

“And there was absolutely nothing written,” Ms. Opal said. “Nothing!”

So Rolla started the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society in response, first in her living room, then in a library, then in a few little houses on Rosedale Street and finally in a home on East Humboldt Street, where it is today.

Those early years were a struggle, one of the biggest being the effort to keep the house on Humboldt Street from being torn down, and Ms. Opal became involved in that effort. It wasn’t long before the historical society was charged with taking over the celebration of Juneteenth in Fort Worth. And Ms. Opal was among those leading the way.

As with so much else she touches, those early celebrations in Sycamore Park were a huge success, with tens of thousands of people taking part. Year after year, she would make sure Juneteenth was a day of joy, remembrance and learning. But as the years went by, she felt she needed to do more.

“Well, it’s like I say, I was 89 and I got the feeling I hadn’t done enough,” she said.

So she got together a county commissioner, a school board member and “I don’t know how many other people.” The musicians from her church, Baker Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, sang and played, and she started walking. She walked two and half miles that day, representing the number of years before enslaved people in this state learned they were free.

And she kept walking every year after that. So she looked for Juneteenth celebrations. She was invited to Shreveport and Denver and Detroit and Georgia. She went where people would see and listen. And she walked.

And people did see her and they did listen.

This year, the White House called Ms. Opal on June 16. She needed to be in Washington the next day. And on June 17, 2021, with the “grandmother of the movement” there in the White House, Juneteenth became a national holiday.

It wasn’t about her. It was about a people and their country and what their country needs to do for them.

“We need it. We need validation. We need, in my estimation, for everybody to be aware of what actually happened. … And I think there are still wrongs that need to be righted,” Ms. Opal said. “We still need to do something. And I’m thinking that we can do more together than we are doing now.”

And she stood up slowly but firmly, all the years not yet holding her down, and she asked her visitor to go see her farm.

Correction, 4:55 p.m., Jan. 1, 2022: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referenced Opal Lee’s sister being with her in Fort Worth in childhood. Her sister was not living at that time.