FIRST FREEDOM

The story of the “Grandmother of Juneteenth.”

This century-spanning graphic novel surveys the life of Opal Lee, the activist who fought to make Juneteenth a national holiday. Now 99, Lee was born in Marshall, Texas. During the Great Depression, Lee’s parents moved their family to Fort Worth to find work, where Lee experienced the pervasive social and institutional racism of city life firsthand. Beginning with Lee’s adolescence in Fort Worth, the book highlights her experiences with race-based hatred, discrimination writ large in broader society, and Lee’s life of public service and social justice, teaching and counseling students in slow-to-integrate public schools and doing every job imaginable at the Fort Worth Juneteenth Museum after retirement. Juneteenth is depicted first as the event it memorializes—the belated announcement of emancipation to Texas’ enslaved people, and later as a celebration of Black history and the ongoing work of social justice for Black communities in Texas and beyond. The book shines when its subject speaks—a confident, committed woman, her words invigorate readers to embrace her perspective and join her efforts. The graphic medium, unfortunately, is not well utilized to bring her impressive experience to life. A few images dazzle—elder Lee seeing her childhood self in a mirror or gazing up at the White House’s historic halls—but characters drawn in classic comic-book style stand static on oversimplified backgrounds, especially earlier in Lee’s life, making a dynamic story feel monotonous. Furthermore, intense plots are dropped without conclusion, leading to puzzlement rather than powerful messaging—in one instance, the burning of her family’s childhood home is dramatically foreshadowed and then not represented in images or explained in accompanying text.

Depicting a life full of active purpose, this stiff graphic interpretation is informationally useful but visually weak.