Check out This Day in History for Dec. 25, in MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
336: The earliest Christmas on record is celebrated in Rome under the reign of Emperor Constantine I, after the Catholic Church sets this day as the standard, perhaps as an effort to challenge Pagan celebrations around the same time of December. Other Christians had chosen Jan. 6 as the Christmas date.
1760: Jupiter Hammon composes the poem that would make him America’s first published Black poet: An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ with Penitential Cries. It is published the following year. Hammon, who remained a slave all his life, went on to publish four poems and four prose pieces, including an address to Black New Yorkers stating his desire to see young Black people free, but not himself.
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope; assassinated NAACP leaders Harry T. Moore and Harriette Moore; and Bing Crosby.
1773: The Philadelphia Tea Party takes place nine days after the Boston Tea Party, with both events objecting to “taxation without representation” by the British. In Philadelphia, word of the protest reached the ships before they docked, prompting six tea-carrying vessels to head to the Delaware Bay rather than risk losing their haul.
1868: President Andrew Johnson grants all former Confederate soldiers a pardon for treason and restores their full rights under federal law. One major impact of the decision was for former Confederate leaders to seek office and influence politics, which some say is why Jim Crow laws prevailed in the South all the way into the 1950s and 1960s.
1870: Christmas is celebrated as a federal holiday. for the first time, after President Ulysses S. Grant’s signing of legislation in June. Christmas was long regarded as a party holiday, especially by early American colonies in the North. By the mid-1800s the holiday’s perception changed, with President Lincoln even hosting Christmas parties in the White House, and was popular with civil war soldiers on both sides.
1941: Bing Crosby’s song “White Christmas” premieres on his weekly radio program, The Kraft Music Hall. Crosby’s recordings of the song afterwards became the #1 hit of in the winter of 1942, and still plays on many radio stations today around Christmastime.
1951: Harry T. and Harriette Moore become the first-ever NAACP members to be assassinated. The couple had led a burst of Black voter registration in Florida and helped found Florida’s first-ever branch of the NAACP. They died when the Ku Klux Klan planted a bomb in their bedroom. Though seven Orlando Klan members were indicted by a grand jury for the murders, the charges are dismissed over a jurisdictional issue. AFter several investigations over the years, a 2006 report concluded four Klan members, all of whom were deceased, were responsible for the Moores’ killings.
2021: The James Webb Space Telescope is launched, and within a year, provides stunning pictures of the universe and has now helped researchers understand “98% of the way back to the Big Bang,” says one researcher.
Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
