Juneteenth becomes a city holiday for Newport News

The Newport News City Council unanimously voted Tuesday night to make Juneteenth a paid holiday for city employees.

The holiday will be observed June 19 annually, unless it falls on a Saturday or Sunday. When it does, the holiday will be observed Friday.

The City Council’s decision comes after Gov. Ralph Northam issued an executive order declaring Juneteenth — a day commemorating the end of slavery in the United States — a holiday for state employees. His announcement left Virginia localities scrambling to decide whether to offer it as a holiday to their employees as well.

Newport News, along with most of Hampton Roads, gave city employees the holiday for the first time in June, but Tuesday night ’s vote was necessary to make the commemoration an annual holiday.

In October, Northam announced legislation unanimously passed to make Juneteenth an annual holiday for state employees, but Newport News does not follow the state holiday schedule — it specifies city holidays in the City Code.

The City Council did not take away an existing city holiday, it just added Juneteenth.

Juneteenth, which is also known as Freedom Day, Jubilee Day, Liberation Day and Emancipation Day, marks the day in 1865 that Union troops led by Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, after the Civil War and told slaves there that they were free. The announcement came nearly three years after P r e s i d e n t Ab r a h a m Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.