Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Dec. 26, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 61 degrees (2019)
- Low temperature: Minus 11 degrees (1983)
- Precipitation: 0.98 inches (1888)
- Snowfall: 5.6 inches (2009)
1908: Jack Johnson — who lived in Chicago and owned a short-lived cafe in the Bronzeville neighborhood — became the first Black heavyweight boxing champion. Johnson defeated Tommy Burns in the 14th round by decision in Sydney, Australia, “when the police took a hand in the affair and stopped the uneven battle,” the Tribune reported.
Five years later, an all-white jury in Chicago convicted Johnson of traveling with his white girlfriend, Lucille Cameron, in violation of the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for “immoral” purposes.
The case would later be held up as a deplorable example of institutional racism in early 20th-century America. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison in June 1913, but fled to Canada with Cameron, whom he 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.
Johnson returned to the United States in 1920 and turned himself in. He served about a year in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, and was released in July 1921 — arriving back in Chicago a few days later to 35,000 people cheering him on. Johnson died on June 10, 1946, in an auto crash in North Carolina, after storming out of a diner where he’d been asked to sit in a rear section reserved for Blacks. He is buried in Graceland Cemetery.
How many presidential pardons or sentence commutations have been granted to people from Illinois?
President Donald Trump granted a rare posthumous pardon to Johnson on May 24, 2018, clearing Johnson’s name more than 100 years after what many see as his racist conviction. The case had been brought to Trump’s attention by “Rocky” star Sylvester Stallone.
1944: Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” — “which tells a worried mother’s problems in marrying off her crippled daughter,” the Tribune earlier reported — held its world premiere at the Civic Theatre in Chicago. The four-character play starred Eddie Dowling, Laurette Taylor, Julie Haydon and Robert Stevenson. The cost of the production was expected to be $40,000 (or roughly $728,000 in today’s dollars).
On Dec. 27, 1944, the feature pages of the Tribune offered a review of the new play. The headline read: “Fragile Drama Holds Theater in Tight Spell.” The reviewer was Claudia Cassidy.
“Paradoxically, it is a dream in the dusk and a tough little play that knows people and how they tick,” Cassidy wrote in her review. “Etched in the shadows of a man’s memory, it comes alive in theater terms of words, motion, lighting, and music. If it is your play, as it is mine, it reaches out tentacles, first tentative, then gripping, and you are caught in its spell.”
1969: A gunman hijacked Chicago-bound United Airlines Flight 929 — a Boeing 727 with 32 people on board — and forced it to fly to Havana from New York City. Pilot Axel D. Paulsen was ordered, “Take this ship to Cuba — and no funny business.”
A spokesperson for the airline said Paulsen told dispatch: “The guy’s got a gun but he’s pretty cool.”
The plane touched down in Havana at 10:03 p.m. then flew to Miami at 1:23 a.m. Chicago time. It was the 33rd American plane hijacked that year.
2018: Retiring Chicago Ald. Daniel Solis signed a secret agreement with federal prosecutors admitting to taking bribes from real estate developers in exchange for his help on zoning issues. The terms of the unprecedented, deferred prosecution agreement that Solis signed with the U.S. attorney’s office that day weren’t made public until April 2022. He became a government mole by wearing an undercover wire to help federal investigators build cases against 14th Ward Ald. Edward Burke and ex-House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Solis entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office, which agreed to drop bribery charges against him in 2025 if he continues to cooperate.
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