Thomas Jefferson’s Hometown of Charlottesville, Va., Will No Longer Mark His Birthday: Report

Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, April 13, will no longer be a holiday in the Founding Father’s hometown of Charlottesville, Va., the city council decided Monday.

City officials voted to scrap the holiday in honor of the slave-owning third president of the United States and instead adopted Liberation and Freedom Day, to be celebrated each March 3. The holiday commemorates the day U.S. Army forces arrived in Virginia in 1865, near the end of the Civil War, the Washington Times reported.

The city council’s decision came just days after James Fields Jr., the 22-year-old driver convicted of killing a woman and injuring dozens of other people at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, was sentenced to life behind bars.

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