Juanita Craft: Civil Rights Shero

Juanita J. Craft, born in Round Rock in 1902, was an absolute star in the civil rights movement in Dallas and her native state of Texas! She is sometimes called “the Martin Luther King, Jr. of Dallas.” She is getting better known over recent years, but she still deserves much more attention for all she did.

The best place to learn about all Juanita did is to visit her Dallas home, now the Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House & Museum. The phenomenal exhibits aptly illuminate her many accomplishments, and also imbed visitors in the everyday artifacts of her life such as her sewing machine and the rotary-dial phone that connected her with neighbors and U.S. presidents. I am indebted to the Museum for allowing me to highlight information from the Museum and illustrate Juanita’s story with photos.

Juanita’s mother Eliza Balfour (left) with sister Jennie Balfour

Juanita Jewel Shanks Craft was born February 9, 1902. Juanita was the only child born to Eliza Lydia Balfour Shanks and David Sylvestus Shanks. As Ella Sauls Morrison of the Round Rock Black History Organization notes in her history of Juanita, both Juanita’s parents were educators, teaching at Stony Point Colored school (Stony Point’s name continues as a Round Rock high school) and at Good Hope Baptist Church School for Colored Children (Good Hope Baptist Church continues on in Round Rock on Chisholm Trail).

The two then taught at Hopewell Colored School in Round Rock, which was built with funds from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation (Julius was the founder of Sears, Roebuck and Company). The Rosenwald Fund built one in five schools for Black children in the South.

David became a high school principal at Hopewell. He went on to teach at Pflugerville, Rockdale, and Columbus, Texas, schools.

Eliza was a teacher at the Round Rock Colored School, earning $35 a month in 1917. She also worked as a seamstress. She taught Juanita sewing and embroidery, skills Juanita would use throughout her life to bring in income. Juanita took over sewing all the family’s clothes when she was 13 years old.

Amy Black Shanks and William Shanks; David is the larger seated child.

David’s father, William, was married to Amy Black Shanks. Both of Juanita’s grandparents were enslaved, as were her great-grandparents. As Juanita recounted in an interview with Michael L. Gillette, “My great-grandfather was sold out of the state of Virginia as a slave into Mississippi. He was sold from a wife and ten children in the state of Mississippi. He was then married to, or bred to, as I’d like to say, a thirteen-year-old woman. He was termed a ‘breeder.’”

Juanita enjoyed summers at her grandparents’ farm near Columbus, Texas.

Amy’s mother and her family were also sold into enslavement in Virginia and sent to Texas.

Eliza’s parents, Susan and James Balfour, came from Tennessee to Columbus, Texas. The family was able to buy a 350-acre farm in 1895. Growing up, Juanita loved being at the farm during the summer and other times, sewing with her grandmother and enjoying nature.

Juanita’s parents educated her from the beginning of their home life together. Juanita received her earliest formal education from her father, and by age four frequently accompanied him to school at the Colored Schools in Round Rock and Pflugerville.

Roosevelt’s trip to Austin—Juanita was there!

Both parents instilled in her a love of reading. And they made sure their daughter would be knowledgeable about current events and thinkers. Politics and civic engagement were of particular importance. For example, her parents took their three-year-old daughter to see President Theodore Roosevelt during his April 1905 visit to Austin. Over the course of her life, Juanita would meet or see nine U.S. presidents.

The Shanks family would talk together about current events, including the cruel realities of life for African-Americans such as lynchings, burnings, and shootings. They likely discussed the lynching of Allan Brooks in Dallas in 1910, which happened at the old red courthouse downtown. Juanita’s family back then could never have foreseen a future when in 2023, the Juanita Craft Humanitarian Awards would honor George Keaton, who fought for and got markers to memorialize the Brooks lynching!

Here's what happened. In 1910, Allan Brooks was working for a white family, and was accused of raping their young daughter. A lynch mob swarmed the Dallas County Courthouse, threw him out a second-story window, and savagely beat him. The mob dragged Alan downtown, and hung him by an arch that said, “Welcome Visitors.”

Decades later, civil rights activist George Keaton founded the group Remembering Black Dallas, carrying on work done by Dr. Mamie L. McKnight, who founded Black Dallas Remembered. George worked tirelessly to get lynchings and other violence publicly acknowledged, as well as pushing for markers noting Black trailblazers.

Before George’s death in 2022, markers for both the courthouse and arch site lynching were installed to tell all what happened at those spots.

Juanita (right) with friend in Round Rock

Round Rock girlhood

Juanita enjoyed life as a girl in Round Rock. She also spent time in Austin where her grandparents lived. When Juanita went to the Pflugerville Colored school where her father taught, it was located in what was called the “Colored Addition” near St. Mary’s Church. This marker tells that history of the area and school.

Juanita attended the segregated Anderson High in Austin.

When Juanita was ready for high school, she and her mother moved to Austin and lived with her grandparents so Juanita could attend the segregated L. C. Anderson High School. Anderson teachers took Juanita and other students on field trips to legislative sessions at the state capitol. That further inspired Juanita’s interest in politics and human rights.

But at 16, Juanita had to put her education on hold when her mother contracted tuberculosis. She and her mother traveled over 200 miles to get treatment at the State Tuberculosis Sanitorium in San Angelo. But her mother was refused admission because she was Black. The two lived in a tent near the hospital while Juanita pleaded with the staff to treat her mother like all the other White TB victims being treated.

None of her pleas helped. Days after returning home, Eliza died. This is her death certificate: death by suffocation. Juanita had to watch her mother die slowly by suffocating due to hemorrhaging from her lungs.

Juanita went to live with her father in Columbus and graduated from high school there in 1919. Already, she had a strong sense of her own keen intellect and ability to change the world around her.

And Juanita showed the sense of humor that others loved about her throughout her life. In an entry she made in 1919 in a scrapbook, Juanita writes: “After several days meditating, a brilliant thot (thought) entered her mind with a determination to win.” Juanita had given herself the nickname of J. J. Jolly Jewel.

An educational path

Juanita ended up at Prairie View State Normal Industrial College (now Prairie View A&M University), which was her father’s alma mater. She wanted to attend the University of Texas, which would have been very close to Juanita’s Austin home at 18th Street and what’s now I-35. But UT didn’t admit Black people. Juanita recalls that Black people couldn’t even walk around the UT campus unless they had a job there.

She earned a certificate for dressmaking and millinery from Prairie View. An interesting note about the history of Prairie View: Students today attend classes on the grounds of what was the Alta Vista plantation, where hundreds of people were once enslaved. The school was initially named Alta Vista Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas for Colored Youth.

And not many realize that both Prairie View AND Texas A & M came about because of leadership from two Black state lawmakers. State representatives Matthew Gaines and William Holland were elected in the brief span of Reconstruction when numerous Black Texans won public office. In 1876, they got legislation passed to establish an institution for Black students which later became Prairie View A&M, as well as the all-white Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (now Texas A&M).

Both men were born to mothers held as slaves and as so, they were also enslaved while young. Matthew Gaines is honored at Texas A & M with this statue erected in 2021 after decades of activism by descendants of Gaines and students.

William Holland pushed for getting the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Institute for Colored Youth begun in 1887 in Austin. The school is a predecessor of the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, which remains nearby on 45th Street in Austin. Holland was honored in Austin in 2018 when the Austin city council renamed Jeff Davis Avenue to William Holland Avenue.

Juanita returned to Austin and earned her teaching certificate at Samuel Huston College, located at what’s now 12th Street and I-35. Samuel Huston College and Tillotson College subsequently merged to become Huston-Tillotson College.

After getting her teaching certificate, Juanita moved to Columbus to teach kindergarten. In 1921, Juanita married her childhood sweetheart, Charles Floyd Langham, who was working as a tailor in Galveston. Juanita worked as a drug store clerk in Galveston, despite her education.

Charles did not support her ambitions, so she left him and moved to Dallas in 1925. She eventually divorced Charles and took back her Shanks surname.

Juanita moves to Dallas

Juanita got a job in Dallas as a bell maid at The Adolphus Hotel. She wasn’t a cleaning maid—a bell maid is a kind of concierge who does tasks for guests such as mending or running errands. Her position at the swank hotel allowed her to meet many of the elite, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh.

Juanita in her years at The Adolphus Hotel

A friend took this elegant portrait of Juanita during the years she worked at The Adolphus. But Juanita could never stay at the Adolphus—she couldn’t even come in through the front door. Juanita would sometimes have Black entertainers booked at the Adolphus stay at her house since practically all of Dallas lodging was off-limits to them. She also rented rooms in her house to porters and cooks unable to find a decent place to live.

Juanita and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt became friends after meeting at The Adolphus, and Eleanor supported and encouraged Juanita to be an activist. When Juanita was angered that postcards showing the horrible lynching of Allan Brooks were being sold at the Adolphus gift shop, Eleanor prevailed on The Adolphus to remove the postcards.

Eleanor always championed Juanita. In 1956, Eleanor asked Juanita to escort the former First Lady—up the FRONT steps of The Adolphus hotel. The Dallas Morning News in their reporting at that time cropped out Juanita from the photo they ran. Eleanor later had tea in Juanita’s house.

Eleanor Roosevelt (left) and Dorothy Height

Eleanor backed many women and others working for change. Here’s the First Lady honoring Dorothy Height, an overlooked “godmother of the civil rights movement” who was key to organizing the 1963 March on Washington.

When the Great Depression hit, Juanita had to resign from The Adolphus in 1934. Many days, she couldn’t afford the fare to get to work every day. Her boarders couldn’t afford to pay her rent, so she sold some of her furniture and used her excellent sewing skills to get by.

Juanita begins at the NAACP

Juanita wanted to do more to fight the omnipresent segregation and violence toward Black people. So in 1935 she joined the Dallas NAACP.

Juanita amid Black leadership including Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall (upper right)

Little did Juanita know then that in the decades to come, she’d be a linchpin to the organization, meeting with national leaders such as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall! Thurgood later said of Juanita, “What the NAACP accomplished in Texas could not have transpired without her.”

The Dallas chapter had begun in 1918, but the Klan-infested Dallas law enforcement and the booming Dallas Klan tried to shut them down. The Dallas Klan led the nation in membership numbers. “Klan Day” at the State Fair attracted 160,000 visitors in 1923. The NAACP chapter dissolved during the 1920s with the high heat of racial hate, and didn’t meet again until the early 1930s.

It quickly became clear to Dallas NAACP leaders that Juanita was a go-getter—she was a whiz at raising money and recruiting members. Juanita had heard of another great NAACP organizer, Lulu B. White, and took the train to Houston to ask if Lulu would like to work together. Lulu said yes, and the two of them galvanized the state of Texas.

Juanita (left) and Lulu receiving lifetime NAACP memberships

Juanita was appointed state organizer in 1946, and she and Lulu got 182 chapters up and running in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. State NAACP male leaders typically got most of the credit, but Juanita and Lulu did the endless work. They’d be the ones persuading ministers to ally churches with NAACP; riding Jim Crow train cars hundreds of miles to recruit in countless towns; and raising money in small towns and big cities.

Juanita was known as a rabble-rouser whose speeches could move people to join and give money. She was particularly adept at persuading people to get involved in racial justice work in their communities.

Both Juanita and Lulu pushed for equal educational access. Lulu recruited Heman Marion Sweatt, the postal worker named in the lawsuit to desegregate the UT law school. Juanita was instrumental in recruiting white UT students and Black students to protest the rejection of Sweatt and other students seeking admission to white schools. When the court ruled for law school integration in 1950, the ruling paved the way for the crucial school desegregation ruling that would happen four years later in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka.

Juanita led school integration protests at many places including the University of Texas.

Juanita fought nonstop in many places for better conditions for Black students. She once visited a rural Black school that had a cesspit right next to it. She found someone with a truck, loaded up the students, and took them over to the white school. The principal, she recalls, was beside himself. But that cesspit got removed shortly after!

Dallas schools refused to integrate long after the Brown case made integration the law of the land in 1954. Juanita worked hard in the long fight for school integration, organizing and helping with lawsuits.

Juanita’s circle of sister activists

Lulu White was one of a strong circle of female activists who supported each other, collaborated, and networked. They all came to Juanita’s house, and she also visited them and helped them in their states. One woman was Daisy Bates of Arkansas, who became President of the NAACP State Conference of Branches. Daisy led the iconic and inspiring integration of Central High School in Little Rock—and much more. Here she is with the “Little Rock Nine” who took the lead in desegregating their school.

Daisy Bates (second from right, standing) with the Little Rock Nine

Like Juanita, Clara was a famed organizer of NAACP youth in Oklahoma City. The young people and Clara started with a sit-in at a drug store - that in TWO days resulted in the desegregation of ALL of their chain stores in three states! Clara led protests that resulted in desegregating hundreds of theaters, hotels, and more across Oklahoma and fought discrimination in housing, voting, and more. ALL done while she taught 41 years in the Oklahoma public schools.

Christia Adair led the fight to desegregate the Houston airport, public libraries, city buses, and department store dressing rooms. Christia and others rebuilt the Houston NAACP chapter to 10,000 members when it was decimated by violence and harassment.

Her work helped Black people to serve on juries and be hired for county jobs. A Houston city park and community center was named for her, which is where this mural that places her in Black History is located. Sadly, I noticed that the mural has fallen into disrepair when I visited it last year. But Christia’s legacy and inspiration never fades!

Erma (center) amid politicians including LBJ vice president Hubert Humphrey (lower left)

Erma Deloney LeRoy traveled around Texas getting Black youth to register and vote, and she was instrumental in rallying Black support for Texas progressives such as Ralph Yarbrough and Maury Maverick. She became president of Houston’s Lulu B. White NAACP branch in 1965. She was invited to the White House several times.

Ella Baker was, like Juanita, a great believer in the power of young people to make change. She rose quickly in the NAACP, becoming the national director of branches in 1943. She wanted to push harder for change, and led the formation of SNCC—the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. She mentored young people constantly.

The civil rights HQ on Warren Street

Juanita bought her now famous house on Warren Street in 1950, following the death of her husband Johnny Edward Craft. She had married Johnny in 1937. Johnny was a salesman who helped earn their income so that Juanita could be an activist. Unlike her first husband, Johnny supported Juanita’s ambitious and time-consuming work.

Johnny died in 1950 in Parkland Hospital in Dallas. Similarly to Juanita’s mother, Johnny’s death was hastened by racism. He died due to poor conditions in the basement segregated ward of the hospital.

Juanita’s home was one of the first Black-owned houses in a formerly white neighborhood. She got bomb threats, and many other homes in formerly white neighborhoods were torched or bombed—15 of them in 1950 alone! This terrorism happened all over Dallas-Fort Worth. This bombed car was a warning for a Black family to get out of the Riverside neighborhood in Fort Worth.

While police identified some of the criminals who bombed and posted hateful signs in Juanita’s neighborhood, they were never charged. Juanita worked with NAACP members to organize armed guards to protect Black-owned houses. The Black organization Knights of Pythias also stood guard at homes threatened by whites.

Juanita’s house quickly became a hub for civil rights activists locally and nationally such as Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Roy Wilkins, who came to see Juanita, the inspiring “Drum Major for Justice.” Her home became a magnet as a place where school children could sit at her kitchen table to do their homework as well as join in lively discussions. And US presidents including Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy would call or come to Warren Street.

Crowds would come to community barbeques and picnics, and the house was a key meeting place for many change-making organizations. Over the years, it would host numerous events from voter registration drives to campaign strategizing for many candidates.

Crowds gathered for talks and singing and action plans in Juanita’s side yard.

The Warren Street house was famed as a site to celebrate. Juanita threw a huge barbeque in 1951, a year after moving in, to celebrate two successful lawsuits to desegregate higher education.

She put picnic tables in her yard, which was verdant with her food garden of vegetables, berries, grapes, and more. Her delicious fried chicken and rolls were famed nationwide.

Juanita mentored Leo Chaney, who became a Dallas City Council member

The backyard was also a site for singing, something Juanita enjoyed since childhood, singing at church and with a group of friends at Prairie View.

Juanita’s former paperboy and mentee Leo V. Chaney recalls that "We used to meet here in her back yard, learning and singing freedom songs.” Leo went on to become a Dallas City Council member, and he is honored by Dallas with the naming of the Leo V. Chaney, Jr. Opportunity Park at Exline Recreation Center.

Music by famous guests such as opera singer Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington also rang from her house!

Guests were invited to sleep in her house in beds or on the floor. Juanita soon made the little back house her living quarters so she could open the house to visitors and renters.

Juanita, Pied Piper to young people

Juanita became the unpaid director of the Dallas NAACP Youth Council in 1946. For the next 30 years, she would teach a steady stream of young people from 12 to 21 to organize and make change. Her work to get young people activated and leading others was unprecedented. The Youth Council’s work earned them the national title of Most Outstanding Youth Council from the NAACP in 1956.

Juanita organized young people and others to fight segregation.

Under Juanita’s guidance, young people would join in protests at lunch counters, department stores, and movie theaters. Dallas landmarks such as the H.L. Green department store, Neiman Marcus, and the Majestic Theater were all targets.

She took teens to Dallas city council meetings and to the halls of the US Congress to have them see how change happen. Hundreds of teens came to Washington, D.C., with Juanita, their ways paid by local businesses. Here’s a group of Craft Kids at the office of Texas Senator John Tower.

The young people got results! Sustained picketing at the H. L. Green’s downtown prompted the store’s move to be the first in the city to give full shopping rights to Black customers. Youth-led activism got 36 restaurants and lunch counters desegregated by 1961, including the fancy Zodiac Room at Neiman Marcus.

Juanita recalls one tactic they used at segregated movie theaters. “The first youth would go up, "One ticket, please." [The agent would say] "We can't sell you a ticket." [The youth would respond] "Thank you." He’d walk right on back and get at the foot of the line. Sometimes we had maybe a hundred kids just keep going there asking to [buy a] ticket. And the agent would say, "I've told you once we cannot sell you a ticket." "Oh. I thought maybe you'd changed your mind." And go right on back.

Clarence Broadnax (right) sparked the Piccadilly protests and Juanita marshalled the troops.

And Juanita could rally REALLY big numbers for those actions. When she heard that Clarence Broadnax had been jailed because he refused to leave the Piccadilly cafeteria after being refused service in May, 1964, Juanita got 350 protesters lined up for a demonstration the very next day. Then the protesters continued to show up in force for 27 following days!

Daily the protesters endured facing throngs of screaming counter-protestors with horrible signs. “Respectable citizens” joined the hatefest, including the Jaycees of Dallas and Mississippi who marched a street-wide Confederate flag down Commerce Street. On the last day of the protest, the Piccadilly came to an agreement with the NAACP.

Making the State Fair open to all

One of Juanita’s most well-known successes is the desegregation of the Texas State Fair. Fair officials gave ONE day over the two-week-long Fair for Black people to enjoy all the Fair’s wonders: on what was called “Negro Achievement Day.” On other days, they could come, but they couldn’t get on rides or buy concessions or see shows. And the harassment and hostile attitude of many whites kept most Black people away.

The young people wanted total integration every day of the Fair, but they faced some opposition from the Dallas Negro Chamber of Commerce and some other leaders. The Negro Chamber saw Negro Achievement Day as beneficial to attract African-Americans from all over the state to patronize Black businesses, cheer in the Prairie View-Wiley football game, and to crown Miss Negro Achievement Day. Juanita and the Council countered with their belief that segregation is NOT acceptable, even when it benefits Black business.

The young folks wanted change to happen quicker. They didn’t think current tactics were effective. These tactics typically included sending a Black “tester” to segregated stores and restaurants who would then be asked to leave, and that incident would be added to a list. So, inspired with some successes for sit-ins and other tactics, Juanita and the Youth Council moved ahead with the State Fair protests in summer 1955.

Many more jumped in to join the young picketers. The protestors would rise early in the morning to picket from opening to late at night. They’d ask Black patrons to boycott Negro Achievement Day, and called the Day “Negro Appeasement Day.” As they put it, "Don't Sell Your Pride for a Segregated Ride!" Many Black fair-goers were reluctant to turn around, having traveled a long way to attend. But Black attendance did go down.

Young activists picket the segregated State Fair.

The Youth Council’s work inspired continued activism. An early supporter of the Youth Council, Minnie A. Flanagan, picketed with them, and she became the Dallas NAACP’s first female president in 1959. Taxi drivers and construction workers showed up to picket, along with the beauticians of Dallas, led by president J’Lena Boykins. The beauticians took off every Monday to protest at the Fair. The pressure continued, but it took until 1967—TWELVE years later—for the Fair to fully desegregate and open every Fair attraction to Black people.

Minnie Flanagan at a State Fair protest; she became the first female Dallas NAACP president

Juanita liked to use humor in her activism. She organized kids and teens in a “Kids Kan Kampaign” (all Ks . . . ) to pick up trash including aluminum cans. As she’d hoped, a local headline said, “Woman Here Starts KKK”! The young people went on weekly cleanups, often accumulating as much as 335 cubic yards of discarded cans.

Kids Kan Kampaign was Juanita’s sly dig at the Klanners.

She also gathered kids at her home to teach them to silkscreen. They printed thousands of flyers, signs, and bumper stickers over the years. That silkscreen is preserved at Juanita’s museum.

And she was simply a loving and inspiring presence to the many kids who treasured the time at her house, whether just talking and having fun or attending meetings. Patricia Perez—who couldn’t wait to docent at the Juanita Craft Museum when it opened—was one of those kids. She recalls her daily hang-outs at Juanita’s house: “This was my place of power. You just felt it being around her. She showed us in word and deed . . . she knew what wasn’t right and what could be changed.”

Juanita was mentoring Joe Atkins while he was a high school student, and she encouraged him to apply to segregated North Texas State College (now University of North Texas). She encouraged Joe to be the lead name in the suit filed by the NAACP, and the case succeeded in 1955. Joe went on to a distinguished career in teaching and realty and was an awarded civic leader who led Juanita’s campaigns for city council. Atkins recalled: “She was a great lady who worked to open doors. She spent her entire life opening doors for other people.”

Many Craft Kids went on to leadership positions in Dallas. Juanita influenced as teens Diane Ragsdale, former member of the Dallas City Council, and Dallas’s first Black judge, Louis A. Bedford. Wayne Gallagher became director of the Texas State Fair Park, a park they helped desegregate.

“Craft Kids” benefited Dallas enormously!

Another Craft Kid of the 1960s, Dr. Trudie Kibbe Reed, was one of the first Black women to enroll at UT-Austin. She became the first female president of the historically Black Little Rock college, Philander-Smith College. She then became president at another HBCU, Bethune Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Juanita and many others fought to bring down the whites-only primary voting policy of the segregationist Democratic party, which at that time in the South was by far the ruling party. The Republicans almost always lost in races. The Democrats got away with this because they defined the party as a “private club” that could make its own rules.

This definition meant that Black people were effectively disenfranchised. As soon as the policy was struck down in a lawsuit, Juanita made history in 1944 by becoming the first Black woman in Dallas County to vote in the primaries.

Although Craft and others were opposed to the poll tax that must be paid before voting, Craft became the first Black woman deputized in the state to collect the poll tax. As long as the poll tax was law, Craft advocated for everyone to pay it so that they could vote.

Juanita also fought for the rights of African-Americans to serve on a jury. She ceaselessly worked for voter turnout, telling Black potential voters that “keeping up with political issues is as important as reading your Bible.”

Juanita ran for Dallas city council at age 74, and in 1975 became the second Black female to win. She served two terms on the Dallas City Council between 1975 and 1979.

She advocated not just for Black people, but for justice for Native Americans, Hispanics, and LGBTQ people. She fought for better Latino representation on the City Council. And when she learned that gay people were being harassed at bars, she’d go to those bars and sip on a glass of buttermilk to make sure harassment didn’t happen. And she’d intervene when it did.

She made allies and strong friendships throughout the city during her Council years and continued years of activism. She’d work with scores of community groups on projects to make Dallas better.

Rabbi Levi Olan came to Dallas in 1948 to take the helm at Temple Emanu-El, the largest synagogue in Dallas. He immediately started fighting for desegregation, and he and Juanita became fast friends. Juanita, Levi said in an interview done by the Juanita Craft Foundation, was like MLK in that “she was a liberating person for ALL people.” She fought for the wellbeing of all, noted Levi, regardless of which group they belonged to.

Juanita worked for justice up until the last days of her life. In June 1985, she worked to get the NAACP conference back to Dallas. Her life was celebrated during that conference. Two months later, she died on August 6, 1985 at age 83.

Juanita is buried in Austin at the Evergreen cemetery at 12th and Airport next to her husband, Johnny E. Craft, and near her father, David S. Shanks. For years, the headstone from her funeral was missing. On August 3, 2024, a beautiful headstone was installed through the efforts of The Friends of Juanita Craft.

And in February of 2024, a splendid mural honoring Juanita was installed in the Dallas neighborhood near her home and museum!