AUSTIN, Texas (RNS) — In 2016, 89-year-old Opal Lee walked from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C., in hopes of establishing Juneteenth as a national holiday. Partly due to her efforts, it became one in 2021.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, when the nation’s last enslaved people in Texas learned of their freedom. The news arrived over two years after Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
But for “the grandmother of Juneteenth,” the holiday carries a grief more personal than for most living today. When she was 12 years old, her family moved into a predominantly white neighborhood in Fort Worth. Shortly after, on June 19, 1939, a mob of over 500 white residents burned the family’s home down.
“It’s just another iteration of a lynching, in a way,” said the Rev. Marcus A.L. Freeman III, senior pastor of the historic Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin. “To just take everything you work for and just burn it down.”
Wesley United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas. (RNS photo/Chloe Landen)
Founded in 1865 by newly freed people, Wesley is one of Austin’s oldest Black institutions. It’s also home to the city’s only lynching marker, which serves to document the history of lynching in America for current and future generations.
Installed in December 2017, the marker is one of over 80 such plaques erected across the nation by the Equal Justice Initiative’s Community Remembrance Project, which began placing the markers to help communities face the violent truths of their past. EJI also constructed the country’s first lynching memorial, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama.
Bryan Stevenson, EJI’s executive director, told RNS that Juneteenth is a time to celebrate emancipation but also to acknowledge continued harm. Despite the positive development in recognizing Juneteenth nationally, “Black people in this country were subjected to another century of torture violence.”
For Stevenson, the work is a matter of faith. Drawing on his own religious community, Stevenson told RNS that people cannot claim to want “heaven and redemption and salvation” but be unprepared to acknowled …