Nobel Peace Prize nominee and “Grandmother of Juneteenth” Opal Lee will speak in The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum's Funk Family Upstander Speaker Series on Tuesday.
The event is sold out, but options to attend the Feb. 7 event virtually are available via Zoom.
The Funk Family Upstander Speaker Series highlights organizations and advocates of human rights on a local, national, or global scale. The series is named after Blanche & Max Goldberg and Fannie & Isaac Funk.
Lee, 96, is a local legend who has advocated against hatred, bigotry and indifference and was largely responsible for Juneteenth being recognized as a federal holiday.
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Every summer, on June 19, Lee is joined by supporters in a 2.5-mile Walk for Freedom from Evans Plaza to Fort Worth City Hall. The distance symbolizes the two and a half years it took for the enforcement of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to reach Galveston, Texas, abolishing slavery in the Lone Star State.
In 2016, at the age of 89, Lee pledged to walk from her home in Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in support of making Juneteenth a federal holiday. She traveled to cities around the country, walking 2.5 miles each day. In 2021, Lee was invited to the White House to stand alongside President Biden when he signed the bill into law making Juneteenth a federal holiday. A year later, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was declared a "civil rights icon" by a congressional signatory.
Lee currently operates Opal's Farm, an organic urban farm that handles food deserts in Tarrant County. She has been involved in establishing the Tarrant County Black Historical & Genealogical Society.
