Gov. Ralph Northam announced Tuesday that he intends to mark Juneteenth as a permanent paid state holiday, starting by giving state employees a day off this Friday, June 19. The governor will propose legislation in the General Assembly to make the holiday permanent.

Virginia has long marked Juneteenth by issuing a proclamation, but the date has not previously been considered a state holiday, a release from the governor’s office stated.

Juneteenth is the oldest known commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States. It marks the day in 1865 that enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, the last of the former Confederate states to abolish slavery, finally heard that the Civil War had ended, and learned that the Emancipation Proclamation had made them free nearly two years earlier.
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