In a unanimous vote on July 1, 2019, the City Council ofCharlottesville, Virginia, established a new city holiday,Liberation and Freedom Day, to be celebrated on March 3.Union Army troops, under the command of Major GeneralPhilip Sheridan, arrived in Charlottesville on March 3, 1865, liberating over 14,000 enslaved workers. "Blacks were the majority race in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area." In the 1870 Census, the first one in which Charlottesville appears, its population was 2,838.
By a 4–1 vote, the city council decided that the April 13 birthday of Thomas Jefferson, founder of theUniversity of Virginia, would no longer be an official holiday in the city of Charlottesville.[1] News stories report that this change was because Jefferson was an enslaver.
On March 3, 2019, the slaves who built the university were honored in a ceremony held in theUniversity Rotunda.[2][3] The university has built aMemorial to Enslaved Laborers, honoring the contributions of slaves who helped build and maintain the school.[4] "The memorial was recommended by a commission convened in 2013 to study slavery and the university."[5]
