Opal Lee, ‘Grandmother of Juneteenth,’ Passes Torch to Granddaughter for Congressional Run
Dione Sims is running for Texas' 25th District to challenge the state's controversial redistricting plans, proving that activism is a family affair.
Dr. Opal Lee is often referred to as the “Grandmother of Juneteenth,” but she is also the real-life grandmother of Dione Sims, the woman running to represent Texas’s 25th District and fight gerrymandering.
Since summer 2025, Sims has witnessed the effort to politically erase the voices of Black voters and people of color in her state with redistricting that could give the GOP 30 of the state’s 38 congressional districts. Even before that, she watched a rise in revisionist history and cultural erasure compromise the progress for which her grandmother and others fought.
In December, the education nonprofit founder decided to stop complaining about it and do something about it by running for Congress.
“I think about my grandmother, what she faced, and that my generation and my children’s generation could experience that again if we don’t do something and pull our government back from the brink,” she said during a Zoom interview this month.
Sims is proudly standing on the shoulders of Lee as she heads into the March 3 primaries.
Lee, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2021, led the movement to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In 2016, at age 89, she began marching to commemorate the enslaved Galvestonians who didn’t know of their liberation until 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. She walked from Fort Worth to Washington, D.C., in increments of 2.5 miles in cities along the way. She walked 300 miles of the 1,400-mile stretch from her home to the capital and collected 1.6 million signatures calling for national recognition of Juneteenth.
On June 17, 2021, Lee was invited to the Oval Office to witness the fruits of her labor: President Joe Biden signing the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law.
Today, however, the Trump administration is working overtime to tear down the history and freedom Lee fought hard to preserve and celebrate. In December, the National Parks Service removed Juneteenth and Martin Luther King Jr. Day from the list of free admission days for national parks, replacing them with Flag Day—which is also Trump’s birthday—and Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday.
At 99, Lee has hope—probably more than most—that this, too, shall pass. The caveat is that it takes action for the pendulum to swing in the other direction.
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