Opal Lee gets keys to her new Texas home 85 years after a racist mob drove her family from that lot

(14 Jun 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Fort Worth, Texas - 14 June 2024
1. Opal Lee walking up to new home
2. Medium of new home
3. Close of street sign
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Myra Savage, Trinity Habitat For Humanity:
“85 years ago today, this land, this community, this neighborhood surrounded her home with hate. Today we are surrounded with love. Absolutely."
5.Tight of people clapping in crowd
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Opal Lee, Civil rights activist:
“I don't know how to describe how happy I am and how I plan to have an open house and invite all if the neighbors in. I'm looking forward to meeting my neighbors."
7. Various of crowd praying during ceremony
8. Various of home with sign nearby that reads "welcome home"
9. SOUNDBITE (English) Opal Lee, Civil rights activist:
“My parents bought a house here, at this location in 1939. When we moved in, we were only here five days. On the 19th of June, people started gathering across the street and, the paper says it was 500 people."
10. Various of home near street sign
11. SOUNDBITE (English) Opal Lee, Civil rights activist:
"Those people drove the furniture out and burned it. They did despicable things."
12. House keys given to Opal Lee
13. SOUNDBITE (English) Opal Lee, Civil rights activist:
"I just so want this community and others to work together and to make this the best city, this state, the best country in the whole wide world. And we can do it together. Our Bible says that we are brothers keeper and we should act like it.”
++ENDS ON SOUNDBITE++
STORYLINE:
Opal Lee, the 97-year-old Texan known for her push to make Juneteenth a national holiday, was given the keys Friday to her new home, which was built on the same tree-lined corner lot in Fort Worth that her family was driven from by a racist mob when she was 12.
“I'm so happy I don't know what to do,” said Lee, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the home just before the ceremony.
The ceremony to welcome Lee into the newly completed home comes just days before the nation celebrates Juneteenth, the holiday marking the end of slavery across the U.S. that means so much to Lee. Several area groups came together to build and furnish the house, which was completed less than three months after the first wall was raised.
Lee said she plans to hold an open house so she can meet her new neighbors.
“Everybody will know that this is going to be a happy place,” she said.
This June 19 - Juneteenth - will be the 85th anniversary of the day a mob, angered that a Black family had moved in, began gathering outside the home her parents had just bought. As the crowd grew, her parents sent her and her siblings to a friend’s house several blocks away and then eventually left themselves.
Newspaper articles at the time said the mob that grew to about 500 people broke windows in the house and dragged furniture out into the street and smashed it. She has said her family didn't return to the house and her parents never talked about what happened that day. Instead, they just went to work in order to buy another home.
Lee has said it wasn't something she dwelled on either, but in recent years she began thinking of trying to get the lot back. After learning that Trinity Habitat for Humanity had bought the land, Lee called its CEO and her longtime friend, Gage Yager.
Yager has said it was not until that call several years ago when Lee asked if she could buy the lot that he learned the story of what happened to her family on June 19, 1939. The lot was sold to her for $10.
(AP video by Kendria LaFleur)
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AMERICA HAS NEVER BEEN GRAET ONCE LIKE MAGA CLAIM PS: I am not an American.