"I'm not just going to sit and rock, you know?" the determined "Grandmother of Juneteenth" told CNN. "The Lord is going to have to catch me." Days later, the spirited nonagenarian shouted with delight as she watched Congress pass a bill to make Juneteenth -- June 19 -- a nationwide holiday commemorating the end of slavery.
"I've got so many different feelings all gurgling up here -- I don't know what to call them all," she told CNN affiliate KTVT in Fort Worth, Texas, where she lives.
Right now she plans to savor the moment. But the woman who spent years fighting for Juneteenth stresses the work that's left to do to push back against racism.
"We've got all of these disparities that we've got to address and I mean all of them. While we've got some momentum I hope we can get some of it done. We can have one America if we try," she told KTVT. At 89-years-old, Lee pledged to walk from her home in Texas to Washington, DC, to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.
A child stung by racism
As a little girl, Lee was the victim of a traumatic event, her first undeniable experience with racism. One week after nine-year-old Lee moved with her family to an all-White neighborhood, a mob surrounded their home and threatened their lives. "My dad came with a gun and the police told him if he busted a cap, they would let the mob have us," she recalls. Lee's parents sent her to friends several blocks away "under the cover of darkness," she tells CNN. "They burned furniture. They set the house on fire. It was terrible. It really was." Lee says outside newspapers in Texas reported the crime -- but local papers from the community where the violence took place ignored it. The date of the attack was Juneteenth. Lee says her parents never spoke of the incident again. "They buckled down, they worked hard. They bought another home, but we never discussed it," she explains." I just know if we had had an opportunity to stay a while they would have found out ... we were just like them." "We wanted the same thing they wanted. A place to live," she recalls. "We wanted food, jobs that would pay a wage." Opal Lee made appearances across the country to promote Juneteenth as a federal holiday.