Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Feb. 11, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Front page flashback: Feb. 12, 2015
2015: Little League International took away the Jackie Robinson West team’s national championship, saying its officials knowingly fielded players who lived outside the team’s residential boundaries — and then tried to cover up their deception.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 70 degrees (1999)
- Low temperature: Minus 14 degrees (1885)
- Precipitation: 0.83 inches (2009)
- Snowfall: 8.3 inches (1956)
1861: President-elect Abraham Lincoln boarded a train in Springfield, which was bound for Washington, D.C.
“To this place and the kindness of this people I owe everything,” he told the crowd. “Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed from a young man to an old man. Here my children were born, and one lies buried. I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon the shoulders of Washington.”
Vintage Chicago Tribune: World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 and Century of Progress, 1933-1934
1891: Ground was broken in Jackson Park for construction of buildings for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.
1966: Martin Luther King Jr. threatened boycotts against local industries (starting with bread, milk, soup and soft drink companies) — an extension of his Operation Breadbasket campaign in Atlanta — that refused to hire Black workers.
Jesse Jackson headed the initiative and became its national director in 1967.
1996: President Bill Clinton established the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie at the 19,000-acre site of the former Joliet Army and Ammunition Plant, making it the nation’s first national tallgrass prairie.
Bison were reintroduced to the land in 2015.
2006: Six inmates — two charged with murder — escaped from Cook County Jail. After plotting the scheme for months, the six men — Tyrone Everhart, of Markham, and Francisco Romero, Arnold Joyner, Michael McIntosh, Eric Bernard and David Earnest, all of Chicago — made their move. The men, who set a fire and overpowered at least two guards, allegedly had the assistance of at least one guard in the Special Incarceration Unit, where inmates with discipline problems spend 23 hours a day in their cells. All were recaptured in a little more than 24 hours.
The incident occurred only hours after the capture of another inmate, Warren C. Mathis, who escaped from the jail the previous day. Mathis rode out of jail aboard a truck, which contained inmates’ dirty laundry.
2015: Brothers Keith and Terrence Nicks were found guilty by separate juries of desecration of human remains, removal of human remains and removal of more than 10 gravestones and markers.
They were charged after a 2009 FBI and Cook County sheriff’s office investigation revealed 1,500 bones of at least 29 people sprawled across the grounds at Alsip’s Burr Oak Cemetery — the same cemetery where lynching victim Emmett Till is buried.
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