Opal Lee gets the keys to her new Texas home in a children’s housing development

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) – Opal Lee, a 97-year-old Texan known for her efforts to have June 11 recognized as a national holiday, on Friday received the keys to her new home, which was built on the same tree-lined corner lot in Fort Worth that when she was 12, her family was expelled by a racist mob.

“I’m so happy I don’t know what to do,” Lee said, sitting in a rocking chair on the home’s front porch just before the ceremony.

The ceremony welcoming Lee to the newly finished home takes place just days before June 11, a holiday marking the end of slavery across the United States, which suggests a lot to Lee. Several community groups joined forces to construct and furnish the house, which was accomplished lower than three months after the first wall was erected.

Lee said she plans to hold an open house so she will be able to meet her new neighbors.

“Everyone will know this will be a happy place,” she said.

June 19 – June 16 – will likely be the eighty fifth anniversary of the day when a mob indignant at the move in of a black family began gathering in front of the house her parents had just bought. As the crowd grew, her parents sent her and her siblings to a friend’s house a few blocks away, after which eventually left themselves.

Newspaper articles at the time reported that the crowd, which grew to roughly 500 people, broke windows in the house, dragged furniture into the street and smashed it. She said her family never returned home and her parents never talked about what happened that day. Instead, they simply went to work to buy one other house.

Lee said she hadn’t given it much thought either, but in recent years she had began eager about reclaiming her estate. After learning that Trinity Habitat for Humanity had purchased the land, Lee called its CEO and her longtime friend, Gage Yager.

Yager said it wasn’t until that conversation several years ago when Lee asked if he could buy the plot that he learned the story of what happened to her family on June 19, 1939. The plot was sold to her for $10.

HistoryMaker Homes built the house for gratis to Lee, and financial services firm Texas Capital provided financing to furnish the home. JCPenney donated household appliances, tableware and bedding.

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In recent years, Lee has turn into generally known as “Grandma Juneteenth” after years of encouraging people to join her in what became a successful push to recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday. The former teacher and faculty district counselor has been tirelessly involved in her hometown of Fort Worth for a long time, including planting a large community garden.

During Friday’s ceremony, Myra Savage, board president of Trinity Habitat for Humanity, told Lee, “Thank you for being a living example of what your home represents today: community, recovery, hope and light.”

Lee said she was so looking forward to moving from the Fort Worth home where she had lived for greater than half a century to a new one which she planned to take with her only the toothbrush she had readily available on Friday.

“I so want this community and others to work together to make this the best city, the best state and the best country in the entire world. and we are able to do it together,” Lee said.