As the nation and Virginia prepares to celebrate Juneteenth, our new entry by Lauranett Lee takes a look at how the poignant celebration of the belated emancipation of the Black residents of Galveston, Texas, became a nationwide holiday incorporating a number of Freedom Day traditions, including those celebrated in Virginia. And while Juneteenth lays claim to being the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, Virginia can lay claim to one of the first recorded celebrations of emancipation—a full two and a half years before Juneteenth. This isn’t surprising because if the enslaved residents of Galveston were among the last to taste emancipation on June 19, 1865—ten weeks after Robert E. Lee’s surrender effectively ended the Civil War—enslaved Virginians were among the first. Exactly four years earlier, on June 19, 1861, three enslaved men who were being used in the Confederate war effort in Hampton self-emancipated to Fort Monroe, a Union outpost on Old Point Comfort. In doing so, Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend set in motion a series of events that would lead to the Emancipation Proclamation.