Fort Worth's Grandmother of Juneteenth, Opal Lee, wants to motivate and inspire North Texas to get out and vote.
She's bringing to town a stage play about Fannie Lou Hamer, the woman considered the mother of voter registration. Hamer was a trailblazing civil rights activist and relentless champion of voting rights in the early '60s.
"She lived in Mississippi. She chose to go and vote, and they wouldn't let her. They beat her unmercifully because she was trying to vote," Lee said. "And I think people need to know this. I think people need to know, hey, we don't have to go through these kinds of things."
An article about Hamer on the National Women's History Museum website says, "In June 1963, after successfully completing a voter registration program in Charleston, South Carolina, Hamer and several other Black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Winona, Mississippi. At the Winona jailhouse, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries from a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage."
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Undeterred, she went on to "become one of the most important, passionate, and powerful voices of the civil and voting rights movements and a leader in the efforts for greater economic opportunities for African Americans."
"Juneteenth is what my grandmother is most known for. She's known as the grandmother of Juneteenth. And the freedom as an American to vote, that is what we're hoping people are excited about, is that when the enslaved were free, and it took a long time even after freedom to get to the right to vote. And that's what Fannie Lou Hamer's story is really about. It's leading up to the 1965 Act for the right to vote, right? So she had to go through literacy tests to even register. She had to go through a poll tax to even vote. And so we don't have those struggles now," said Dione Sims, Lee's granddaughter and Executive Director of the nonprofit Unity Unlimited.
Sims says Lee recently saw an excerpt of the award-winning production of The Fannie Lou Hamer Story and was determined to bring it to Fort Worth before Election Day, November 5th.
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"I just didn't even give it a thought. I just told her (the actress) to come to Fort Worth and bring this to us. And now, the kinds of things we've had to do to get her here! Well, come Sunday, I think it's going to work," Lee said.
"My grandmother gets bees in her bonnet, and my job is to make them come true. This one, I think, was worth the effort to try and make sure our community knows about it," Sims said. "Sometimes young people can get apathetic. Well, old folks are going to do what they want to anyway. And then the older generation's like, well, my vote's not going to count. But everybody's vote and everybody's voice matters."
The one-woman The Fannie Lou Hamer Story plays on Sunday, Nov. 3 at 3 p.m. at the I.M. Terrell Performing Arts Complex at 1411 I M Terrell Circle South in Fort Worth.
Tickets are available here.
