Yesterday a fireplace on the website of the unique Juneteenth Museum destroyed the establishment began by activist, educator, and 2022 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Opal Lee. The Museum commemorates the vacation, which celebrates the information of the Emancipation Proclamation reaching Galveston, Texas on June 19, 1865, practically two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the edict.
Lee, dubbed the “grandmother of Juneteenth” opened the small museum practically 20 years in the past in a residential constructing located on the nook of Rosedale Road and Evans Avenue in Fort Price. The positioning was additionally the filming location used within the 2019 movie Miss Juneteenth.
Lee, aged 96, has devoted her life and profession to Juneteenth. Along with managing the museum, she tirelessly campaigned for the date’s observance as a federal vacation, which got here to fruition in 2021.
This previous June the small-but-mighty museum introduced its plan to reestablish its operations in a a lot bigger Nationwide Juneteenth Museum, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and native agency KAI Enterprises, that will likely be positioned on the identical website.
The Nationwide Juneteenth Museum, scheduled to open in 2025, will likely be constructed utilizing timber and can characteristic a pleated roof. Exhibition house will likely be centered round a courtyard. On the middle of this patio a five-point star will likely be engraved in gold symbolizing the State of Texas, the final Accomplice state to free enslaved folks, in addition to the liberty of African People in the US at this time.
Lee’s granddaughter, Dione Sims, will function the brand new museum’s founding government director. Along with sharing native tales associated to emancipation and slavery, the brand new museum will tackle nationwide purview, sharing histories associated to abolition, the southern Underground Railroad to Mexico, and extra and also will home a enterprise incubator for Black entrepreneurs, a meals corridor with culturally Black delicacies, and a efficiency venue. Its development is a component of a bigger mixed-use growth to revitalize the neighborhood, an space that has been scarred by financial decline following the divisive development of I-35W within the Sixties.
Simply after 1:15am, the #FWFD responded to a reported construction hearth within the 1100 block of Evans Ave. within the southside space of #fortworth. Upon arrival, crews noticed a 1-story wooden body residential construction totally concerned in flames. [1/4] pic.twitter.com/OoSuMKTUa9
— Fort Price Fireplace Division (@FortWorthFire) January 11, 2023
As for yesterday’s blaze, the Forth Worth fire department shared on its Twitter that the entire artifacts within the authentic museum had been eliminated in preparation for his or her transfer to the brand new museum.
In an interview yesterday with native ABC information affiliate WFAA, Lee stated: “I hate that it burned down. Younger folks would hearken to these of us who had been a lot older and we may inform them about what we went by in our day and the way the instances had been altering. However I’m delighted we acquired all the pieces out that we’ll be utilizing within the new museum.”
The 2 adjoining constructions additionally caught hearth. Crews had been in a position to extinguish the blaze after about an hour and confirmed that one individual was handled for smoke inhalation.
The reason for the hearth continues to be beneath investigation.
