Opal Lee’s Walk for Freedom won’t be in Fort Worth this year, but its mission is unchanged
The popular Juneteenth walk by Fort Worth’s Opal Lee is being moved to Dallas this year but its mission to recognize the importance of the holiday remains the same.
Opal’s Walk for Freedom will take place at 9 a.m. June 19 beginning at the African American Museum of Dallas at 3536 Grand Ave. It will cost $35 for adults to participate in the walk; $10 for spectators; and $15 for non-walkers to buy a shirt.
The walk, which started in 2016, was held to lobby for having Juneteenth recognized as a national holiday. Since it became a holiday in 2021, its focus has shifted to educating people nationally about Juneteenth and its focus on freedom, according to Dione Sims, Opal Lee’s granddaughter and president and founder of Unity Unlimited Inc., which is in charge of the walk.
The walk is being held in Dallas to show the impact Juneteenth has in other cities around the country, Sims says.
The walk will move back to Fort Worth in 2025 and will take place in Washington, D.C., in 2026 at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Cities across the country and world are expected to have walks to coincide with the walk in Texas, including in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Tokyo.
For years, Opal Lee championed for national recognition of Juneteenth as a holiday. It commemorates the end of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865, when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln had signed more than two years earlier.
Juneteenth had long been commemorated in Texas, as it became a state holiday in 1980. In Fort Worth, more than 30,000 people celebrated Juneteenth in 1975 in Sycamore Park.
In 2016, Lee began her campaign for the national holiday with a symbolic walk to Washington, D.C. Lee was 89 at the time and crossed over 14 states and 1,400 miles. She relaunched the campaign in 2019, crossing over seven states until the next year when COVID-19 cut the trip short. On Juneteenth in 2020, Lee walked 2.5 miles from the Fort Worth Convention Center down Lancaster to the Will Rogers auditorium. The next year, she was in attendance when on June 21, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a federal bill that nationally recognized the holiday.
The walk is 2.5 miles to symbolize the two and a half years it took for slaves in Texas to realize they had been freed.
To help fund the planned National Juneteenth Museum, $6.19 from every registration will go to the museum’s fundraising campaign and to fund programs at Unity Unlimited. Unity Unlimited is a nonprofit organization started in 2000 by Sims to build programming for young people to work together and help confront and defy racial stereotyping for youth, Sims says.
The museum will be a beacon of education around the story of emancipation and what freedom can be, including financial freedom and freedom to receive adequate healthcare and more, Sims says.
“The National Juneteenth Museum is a great benefit, not just for the local community but the nation,” Sims said. “So we’re hoping to make sure that we are a part of that history and that legacy of getting the museum built.”
To register for the walk go to opalswalk.com.
