Check out This Day in History for Dec. 15, in MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
1791: The U.S. Bill of Rights becomes law when the state of Virginia votes for its approval. The 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution guarantee basic rights like freedom of expression and religion and due process of law.
The Bill of Rights, tennis legend Arthur Ashe, Sioux leader Sitting Bull, the American Psychiatric Association logo, and defamed election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss
1810: America has its first-ever immigrant English language newspaper, when the Shamrock begins publication and continues through 1815, reporting on events in Ireland that other publications ignored.
1873: Hearkening the spirit of the Boston Tea Party 100 years earlier, thousands of women gather for the Women’s Tea Party to demand voting rights for women. The group contended that America’s founding fathers in 1776 had “shut their eyes on one side to women, and on the other side to the negro, and narrowed the great Republic of the last seventy years to a white male Republic.” Women would not receive the right to vote until 48 years later.
1874: The world’s first-ever child protection agency is founded, when the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in NYC meets for the first time. The group was formed by a church worker concerned about a severely abused girl in her church and two lawyers who specialized in animal anti-cruelty legislation. It continues today as the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and has now served over 2 million children, parents and caregivers.
1890: Sitting Bull, a revered Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader who helped champion the Ghost Dance spiritual movement rising up against white oppression, is killed by Indian police sent to arrest him. His death essentially ends the Ghost Dance movement.
1950: An official government report titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Perverts in Government“ is released, encouraging the ongoing purging of homosexuals from government employment as a security threat. The report was part of the “lavender scare” of homosexuals,, and connected to the part “Red Scare” of Communism, attempting to link homosexuality to Communism.
1961: Former Nazi party official Adolf Eichmann is sentenced to death by an Israeli court for his role in sending millions of Jews to their death during World War II. Eichmann had escaped detection after fleeing to Argentina after the war. He would be executed less than a year later.
1970: The Venera 7 is the first spacecraft to land on another planet. The Soviet spacecraft landed on Venus, and also transmitted data back to Earth.
The late Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who lived most of her life as the secret daughter of segregationist Strom Thurmond, speaks about her lineage.
1973: Homosexuality is reclassified from a severe mental illness, to a “sexual orientation disturbance” by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The change leads to less stigmatization but leaves same-sex attraction considered a deviation that could be “treated.”
1988: The State of Palestine is officially recognized by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 43/177. The resolution also called for Palestine to have sovereign control over land held by Israel.
1992: Arthur Ashe is named Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year, more than a decade after his retirement from professional Tennis. Ashe won the award for his commitment to activism on behalf of public health; he had undergone two heart attacks and contracted HIV during surgery in the years since his retirement, and travelled continuously to speak on behalf of HIV awareness. He would pass away less than a year later from complications of AIDS-related pneumonia.
2003: The family of the late Strom Thurmond, among history’s most vocal segregationists, acknowledges his mixed-race daughter, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a schoolteacher born to Thurmond’s former housekeeper, with whom the late consrevaite had a brief intimate relationship. Both Thurmond and Washington-Williams kept their relationship secret until after Thurmond’s death. Washington-Williams said she had kept her father’s identity secret out of respect for the Thurmond family, but decided to come forth after he own children began pressing her to do so in order to fully understand their own lineage.
2023: Rudy Giuliani, former attorney for President Donald J. Trump, is ordered to pay $148 million in damages to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, former Georgia election workers whom he repeatedly accused of falsifying ballots and other misdeeds he claimed were part of a vote-stealing scheme. All of his accusations were proven to be false. The two workers eventually settled with Giuliani in January 2025 in an undisclosed agreement, following Giuliani’s claim of bankruptcy a few months earlier.
Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons
