85 years after a racist mob drove Opal Lee’s family away, she’s getting a new home on the same spot

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — When Opal Lee was 12, a racist mob drove her family out of their Texas home. Now, the 97-year-old community activist is getting closer to moving into a brand new home on the very same tree-lined corner lot in Fort Worth.

“I’m not a person who sheds tears often, but I’ve got a few for this project,” said Lee, who was one of the driving forces behind Juneteenth becoming a national holiday. A wall-raising ceremony was held Thursday at the site, with Lee joining others in lifting the framework for the first wall into place. It’s expected that the house will be move-in ready by June 19 — the day of the holiday marking the end of slavery in the U.S. that means so much to Lee.

This June 19 will also 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.

“Those people tore that place asunder,” Lee said. Her family did not return to the house and her parents never talked about what happened that day, she said.

“My God-fearing, praying parents worked extremely hard and they bought another home,” she said. “It didn’t stop them. They didn’t get angry and get frustrated, they simply knew that we had to have a place to stay and they got busy finding one for us.”

She said it was not something she dwelled on either. “I really just think I just buried it,” she said. In recent years though, 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...