Macon County's First African American Heritage Trail Marker Unveiled
The first trail marker on the Macon County African American Heritage Trail was unveiled on September 23, 2025 honoring Ellsworth H. Dansby, Jr. and his family and placed at Ellsworth Dansby, Jr. Magnet School, 2160 W. Center St., Decatur.
Ellsworth H. Dansby, Jr. was born in Decatur, Illinois, on October 5, 1914, the eldest son of Ellsworth H. Dansby, Sr. and Luella Greenlee [Rogan] Dansby. Growing up in the Lincoln Park neighborhood he spent his early years learning everything he could about flying. He later explained that he would watch flies as they lifted off and banked into turns, and dreamed of the days he could do that himself. His first attempt was by launching himself from a Decatur hillside on a frame of bedsheets. At the age of nine he had a model airplane “factory” in the basement of his family’s home on South Boyd Street in order to work with neighborhood kids.
He attended Mary W. French Elementary School, and then Roosevelt Jr. High School through ninth grade before graduating from Decatur High School in July 1934.
Anticipating the possible entrance of America into World War II, in March 1941 the U.S. Army opened its Air Corps to Blacks. Dansby immediately left his job as a waiter at Decatur’s St. Nicholas Hotel and went to Rantoul’s Chanute Air Force Base where at age twenty-six he was accepted on March 24, 1941 into the technical school of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first flight outfit organized in the United States “for Negroes.”
Only the second Black man admitted to the Army Air Corps, he was soon joined in Rantoul by dozens of others from around the country. The first photo of a dozen of them in uniform in front of a B-18 Bomber appeared in the Decatur newspapers on April 27, 1941. Because of his age and mechanical skills he was trained to become a hydraulics specialist and was soon transferred with his comrades to train at a segregated facility with Black pilots near Tuskegee University in Alabama. He was the first Black Master Sergeant in the Army Air Corps and was a line chief who supervised seventy-five mechanics for the Tuskegee Airmen.
In the 1950s he became the first Black person in Decatur to join the First Presbyterian Church, and by 1961 was elected an Elder, and later served as chair of the Presbyterian Synod of Illinois’ Commission on Religion and Race. In the late 1960s he served on the Citizens Consulting Committee to help advise Decatur School District #61 about racial issues. In 1968 he ran for and won one of the seven seats on the Decatur school board. He was the only Black on the board and only the second to serve since its creation one hundred years before, and took his seat one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a time of much racial tension in the city and nation. In March 1969 he joined the 5-2 majority on the board to approve the controversial Community Commission on Integration [CCI] “plan to integrate the city’s twenty-eight elementary schools.”
The trail is coordinated by the HICF's Untold Stories Committee and celebrates the "irreplaceable contributions" of Macon County's Black citizens throughout the years.
