Now, more than 84 years after the racist mob forced her from her home, Lee has been given back the land where her house once stood. And Trinity Habitat for Humanity has gone one step further: A house is being built for Lee and expected to be completed sometime in 2024.
Gage Yager, chief executive of Trinity Habitat for Humanity, said he got a phone call from Lee inquiring about buying what was her family’s land.
“She’s like, ‘You guys own my lot at 940 East Annie,’” Yager said. “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.’”
WFAA, an ABC affiliate in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, was the first to report the story.
Lee garnered national attention in 2016 when she walked 1,400 miles from her home in Fort Worth to D.C., hoping to ask President Barack Obama to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. Her efforts paid off in 2021, when President Biden signed legislation establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery. Lee, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday morning, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
Lee’s father, Otis Flake, left East Texas during the Great Depression and headed to Fort Worth to find work, Lee told Texas Monthly in June. Flake, a railroad employee, moved his family into a home on East Annie Street on June 18, 1939.
“It was going to be the nicest place we had in Fort Worth,” Lee told WFAA. “We were so proud of it.”
Although the real estate agent who sold Lee the home assured him that there would be “no trouble about it” in the neighborhood, that was not the case. Local residents had tried to keep homeowners from being able to sell property to Black people. A neighbor on Annie Street said that “he advised the Negroes to move out, telling them the community wished them no trouble,” according to the Star-Telegram.
Hours after they moved in, Lee’s mother said, two men came to the house and ordered them to move, the Star-Telegram reported at the time. Later that night, two men driving by in a car barked out similarly intimidating instruction: “You’re here tonight, but you’ll be moved out tomorrow night.”