​Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on July 10, according to the Tribune’s archives. Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Flashback: July 10, 2015
– Oxygen levels dropped inside the Brookfield Zoo’s Stingray Bay, resulting in the deaths of all 54 stingrays housed in the exhibit.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
– High temperature: 102 degrees (1936)
– Low temperature: 50 degrees (1997)
– Precipitation: 1.89 inches (1876)
– Snowfall: None
1886: Capt. George Wellington Streeter’s steamboat Reutan ran aground on a Near North Side sandbar that would become Streeterville. From the 1880s until his death in 1921, Streeter asserted ownership and sovereignty over 186 acres of prime lakeshore between the mouth of the Chicago River and Oak Street. An 8-foot bronze statue of Streeter—wearing a top hat and holding his dog Spot—stands at the northwest corner of McClurg Court and Grand Avenue.
1912: Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson opened Cafe de Champion at 41 W. 31st St. in Bronzeville. But only three months after it opened amid fanfare, his wife Etta died by suicide in the couple’s apartment above the venue while revelers celebrated below. The shooting made the front page of the Tribune the next day. In 1913, an all-white jury in Chicago convicted Johnson of traveling with his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, in violation of the Mann Act, which prohibited transporting women across state lines for “immoral” purposes. The case became a stark example of institutional racism in early 20th-century America. Johnson was sentenced to a year and a day in prison in June 1913 but fled to Canada with Cameron, whom he later married while free on bond. He remained a fugitive for seven years, traveling from Europe to Mexico, where he fought bulls and ran a bar called the Main Event. President Donald Trump granted a rare posthumous pardon to Johnson on May 24, 2018.
1925: John Thomas Scopes, charged with teaching evolution in Tennessee, went to court in the celebrated “Monkey Trial.” WGN Radio broadcast the proceedings live—including Clarence Darrow’s defense of Scopes—a milestone for the new medium of radio and a Chicago institution.
1966: Two years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was the keynote speaker at the Illinois Rally for Civil Rights at Soldier Field, he returned to deliver another speech on a sweltering day. King told the 30,000 attendees, “This day we must decide to fill up the jails of Chicago, if necessary, in order to end slums.” He outlined 14 basic goals of the Chicago Freedom Movement and later posted them to the LaSalle Street entrance of City Hall.
1989: Phil Jackson was hired as head coach of the Chicago Bulls to replace Doug Collins. After the Bulls won their sixth championship trophy, Jac…