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Learn more about Early Black Student Experiences at Millikin University 1903-1960
Fred McGregory was the first Black man to attend the Millikin Academy, and the first to earn a varsity letter on an MU team. Working in Decatur and Chicago, he was a mechanic, chauffeur, inventor and salesman, and the first Millikin student to secure multiple United States Patents.
Fred was born in Olney, Illinois, to parents James C. McGregory and Sarah Slaughter McGregory on May 19, 1884. The family moved to Decatur in the early 1890s where his father maintained a barber shop at 124 N. Franklin Street. Fred attended Decatur High School where he participated in baseball and track, and then enrolled in the industrial arts area of the Millikin Academy. School records state he was a third-year student in the fall of 1903, the start of MU’s first academic year. In the spring of 1904 he played center field on the school’s first baseball team and was awarded his varsity M. The Decatur newspaper reported that Fred had “the best field record on the varsity.” After one game, the April 7, 1904, The Daily Decatur Review stated: “McGregory, the young colored boy, who officiates in the central garden for the college, pulled down several drives which looked like home runs.”
After leaving the Millikin Academy, McGregory made a living buying and selling properties in Decatur (possibly an early version of flipping houses), working as an auto mechanic, promoting inventions, and beginning in 1909, serving at various times as the chauffeur for wealthy widow Anna Conklin. He also shipped Mrs. Conklin’s auto to California by rail and then joined her there to drive her around the state. On May 25, 1913, The Decatur Herald reported that Fred was with Conklin near Los Angeles and had commented about an auto climb competition of the rugged Mount Washington trail. It is also documented that he chauffeured Mrs. Conklin in California during the winters of 1920-21 and 1921-22.
On January 17, 1916, Fred H. McGregory applied for a U.S. patent for a “Dustless Duster.” That term had been used generically for a number of years and “Howard Dustless Dusters” were marketed greatly around the nation and in newspaper ads in Decatur. But McGregory’s patent application stated that he had “invented new and useful Improvements in Dustless Dusters” and that his product was specifically suitable for wiping automobiles free of dust without harm. Although his patent was not fully approved until June 22, 1920, the Bartlett-Martin auto partnership at 301 East Main Street, sellers of Apperson, Grant and Maxwell autos, took Illinois rights for the product and ordered 50,000 units in April 1916. How and if McGregory could produce such quantities at his business at 245 N. Main Street is unknown, and Bartlett-Martin went out of business that October. However, Decatur City Directories list McGregory as doing “dustless duster” manufacturing through 1923.
In an automotive era before electric turn signals and brake lights, McGregory also came up with a solution which he felt would make driving safer. On April 16, 1916, The Decatur Review printed a lengthy article about his invention which he had already patented on February 2, 1915. Fred McGregory, colored chauffeur for Mrs. A. W. Conklin, has just patented a new traffic signal which promises to become a winner. He is now using the signal on the Conklin car and it has attracted wide attention. By turning a lever near the driver’s seat, his invention would turn a three-part sign above the rear license plate that read STOP, RIGHT, and LEFT, hopefully informing those behind of the driver’s intent. He felt that this would become of increased importance as more and more motorists selected “closed cars” making hand signals more difficult. Ahead of his time, flashing front and rear turn lights did not become standard equipment on American autos until the 1950s.
In September 1924, Fred was involved in a high speed traffic accident north of Urbana. The driver of the other auto was killed and McGregory was charged and arrested. Mrs. Conklin posted his $10,000 bail and it appears that Fred stayed out of jail during subsequent hearings and lawsuits. His mother passed in 1924, and after his father passed in 1932, Fred became a full-time Chicago area resident. He was a salesman for a Ford dealership, and then as G.I.s returned from WW II, a sales representative for the new Parkway Gardens Homes, and later a salesman for a new innovation, aluminum framed replacement windows.
Fred was married to socialite Ellen Brazelton-Smith, but had no children.
Fred McGregory, a man of many talents, passed away in Chicago on October 25, 1960, at the age of seventy-six. He rests in the Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.
I’m proud to have been a Millikin man. Fred Long, December 4, 1950
On May 31, 1918, Fred Thomas Long was the first African American to graduate from Millikin University. He went on to play professional baseball in the newly-formed National Negro Baseball League; teach and coach at several Historically Black Colleges and Universities [HBCUs]; and be enshrined in many athletic halls of fame.
Long was born in Decatur, IL, on January 22, 1896, to parents Hinton O. Long and Idlean Baber Long. His father, “Cook” Long worked at the Decatur Cracker Company and played industrial league baseball on a “colored” team for that factory, and later worked at the Conklin Bakery. Mother Idlean encouraged Fred to excel scholastically and keep going to school. Both parents and their children were very active in Decatur’s Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
Fred started playing baseball as a young boy at Decatur’s Warren Street School, but only on colored teams. At age sixteen he joined the new Junior Excelsior Club and was elected president of the group whose object was “to elevate the young colored people of Decatur.” In June of 1913, he was one of 108 graduates of Decatur High School, the only Black male in that class. He attended Millikin for the 1913-1914 academic year, and then took the fall 1914 semester off, re-entering the university in the spring of 1915. In the fall of 1916, Fred went from being a varsity football substitute to becoming the starting center on the undefeated Illinois Minor College Championship team. Three men from that MU team went on to be part of the 1920 Decatur Staley’s professional team. In the fall of 1917, the local press reported that Long had to miss some away football games because of his duties as chauffeur for Decatur businessman and Millikin supporter Thomas Tenbrooke Roberts. Fred Long also won four varsity letters in baseball while at Millikin.
Long graduated from Millikin with a B.S. in Commerce and Finance. His senior thesis analyzed the population, occupations and education of Negroes in Decatur and was abstracted in the June 2, 1918 issue of the Decatur Review. In July of that year, Long was drafted and sent to Wendell Phillips School in Chicago for special army training for Blacks in motor mechanics, carpentry, and electronics. As World War I was winding down, he served with a segregated motor company in Georgia until being discharged and returned home to Decatur in January 1919. While in the South, he wrote to his brother Harry that he really appreciated the racial acceptance he had while at JMU, and that “Before this war is over, the prejudice crackers will learn that there are some negroes who aspire to be something.” Back in Decatur, Long played some industrial league baseball with the local colored Comet Six team in 1919 and joined the newly formed National Negro League Baseball Detroit Stars for five games in 1920, and eleven games in 1921. Starting in September 1921, he taught and coached for two years at HBCU Paul Quinn College, then located in Waco, Texas. He also returned to Negro League baseball for two more summers, hitting .359 in forty-three games for the Indianapolis ABCs in 1925, and back to the Detroit Stars for sixteen games in 1926 at age thirty.
From 1923 to 1947 he worked at HBCU Wiley College located in Marshall, Texas, where his football teams won eight conference titles in that span and Black College National Football Championships in 1928, 1932 and 1945. During this time Fred married Della Eulalia Wheatley who taught English at the “colored” high school in Marshall, and later at Wiley College. They both received their Master’s degrees from the University of Michigan in 1944. In June 1948, Long, his wife, and several over Wiley faculty and staff were dismissed from their positions most likely because they were thought to have supported a student walkout in the fall of 1947.
Thus, Long moved to Prairie View A&M University in 1948 and then to Texas College in Tyler from 1949 to 1954. In 1950, as athletic director of Texas College, Long contacted Millikin, and several other Illinois colleges that he had competed against, to see if they would host his school’s Negro basketball team. All said yes, and on Monday, December 4, 1950, the first of a series of games was played in Decatur. A banquet was held before the game in Long’s honor and during the game’s halftime, the MU president presented Fred Long with a Millikin blanket with gold stars representing his thirty years of coaching. Decatur Review sports editor Forrest Kyle wrote the next day that: “A Millikin great had come back to his home town, if only briefly, and the memories were good and the compliments sincere. And you knew, again, that one of the great values of athletics lies in the esteem with which athletes hold for one another and it will never be shaken by the prejudices of religion, creed or race.”
Long returned to Wiley in 1956 as head football coach and athletic director until his health issues worsened in 1965. The Fred Thomas Long Student Union Building at that school was later named in his honor. During forty-five years of coaching he compiled at least 224 victories while mentoring twenty-seven All-Americans. In 1962, Long was inducted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame; became a charter member of the Millikin University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1970; the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame in 1996; the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2001; and in 2010 received the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA)'s 2009 Trailblazer Award. He was enshrined in the Black College Football Hall of Fame on June 7, 2025.
After his second heart attack, Fred Long stopped coaching in 1965 and passed on March 23, 1966 at age seventy. He rests in the McJohnsons Cemetery, Marshall, Texas. His wife Della passed on March 4,1959, and rests nearby.
Mark W. Sorensen
May 17, 2026
To keep the brothers straight, Harry was called “Little” Long, an appellation given to two other fine Millikin athletes of about the same era, “Big” and “Little” MacWherter for Kile and Johnny.
Decatur Review sports editor Howard V. Millard, December 17, 1945.
Harry Long was a multiple letterman in football and baseball at Millikin University and the second African American to graduate from that school. He went on to teach at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and became a long-time assistant football coach to his older brother Fred Long.
Long was born in Decatur, IL, on December 28, 1897, the second son of parents Hinton Long and Idlean Baber Long, and brother to the first Black Millikin graduate, Fred Long. His father, “Cook” Long worked at the Decatur Cracker Company and played industrial league baseball on a “colored” team for that factory, and later worked at the Conklin Bakery. Mother Idlean encouraged her sons to excel scholastically and go to college. Both parents and their children were very active in Decatur’s Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
Harry graduated from Decatur High School in June 1915 and that fall started at Millikin. He played on several teams with his brother, earned varsity letters in both football and baseball, and graduated on June 13, 1919 with twenty other students. [Because of World War I, enrollment was low and only four men were in his class, and Harry was the only Black student in his junior and senior year.] In the summer of 1919 he played baseball with his brother on the local all-Black Comet Six team before becoming the “physical director” at the Evanston, IL, “colored YMCA” that September. In 1920-1921 he had the same type of job at a YMCA in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1921, Harry began working and coaching at HBCU Prairie View State Normal & Industrial College [now Prairie View A&M University] in Prairie View, Texas. On February 4, 1922, he married Eugene “Lela” V. Brown in Bexar, Texas. That fall he moved to teach and coach at HBCU Paul Quinn College [then in Waco, Texas], and in 1925 was the head football coach there when competing against his brother Fred who was the head football coach at Wiley College. Harry worked at HBCU Tennessee State Normal College in 1928-1929 before joining his brother at HBCU Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. Harry served as head of the biology department at Wiley and the football team’s backfield coach, while also getting his master’s degree at Columbia University.
On December 9, 1945, the undefeated Wiley College Wildcats played Florida A & M in Tampa in the Orange Blossom Classic for the national Negro football title. During the game, Harry Long suffered a massive heart attack and died in the ambulance on the way “to the Tampa negro hospital.” Play continued without the team knowing they had lost their coach, and they triumphed 32-6 to secure the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and national Negro titles. At the time of his passing, Harry was months away from earning his doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Harry Long was buried in the McJohnsons Cemetery in Marshall, Texas. His wife Eugene was her high school valedictorian, received her master’s degree, worked as a Marshall school teacher and in several college positions, as well as a Trustee of Wiley College, before her passing in 1982. Their daughter, Carolyn Jeanne Long, was born in Waco on August 20, 1927. After attending Wiley and medical school, she became a pediatrician in Austin, Texas. Sadly, she died of a heart attack at age thirty-two in 1960.
Gertrude Dansby was educated in Decatur Public Schools and was involved in many musical events and plays at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After her mother died in 1906, she moved in with her maternal grandmother Martha Gamble at 561 South Franklin Street while attending the James Millikin University Conservatory. Before getting her JMU certificate in 1910, she won several art contests including getting a free Millidek yearbook for the “best head piece” drawing and a first place cash prize for her oil painting of a live model. In 1911 she moved to Chicago by herself and worked as a live-in domestic while attending the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. She was one of eighty students who graduated from there in June 1914, only a few months after her father died.
On November 19, 1915, she married Decatur hotel porter Wormath Dyer, but received a divorce eleven months later and took back her Dansby name. In late 1916 she took a job teaching and supervising an art studio in Covington, Kentucky. Unfortunately Gertrude suffered from inflammatory rheumatism and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 20, 1920, at only twenty-eight years of age. A few days later the Decatur Review eulogized her stating, “She was probably the most talented colored woman ever a resident of Decatur.” The location of her remains is unknown.
In 1934 Marian Vanderburg was the first Black woman to graduate from Millikin University. She went on to be a teacher, mother, and long-time Decatur counselor.
Marian Vanderburg was born in Decatur, September 7, 1910, the only child of Sabe Vanderburg and Anna Hunt. Sabe was a custodian at Decatur’s Wabash Railroad Station and well-known in the Black community. Anna was very active in clubs and support groups, especially related to church. The Vanderburgs lived at 1188 W. Green Street for their entire adult lives. Marian attended Lincoln School and took piano lessons at the Millikin Conservatory. She graduated from Decatur High School in June 1928, and then attended HBCU Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, for two years where she was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Marian transferred to Millikin for her last two years of college where she majored in English and minored in French and was active in both of the clubs related to her studies. She graduated with a B.A. on June 5, 1934, along with James Parsons, the only two Black students in their class. The following month, the two of them were featured speakers at Decatur’s Young Negro Republican Club meeting. Marian then attended the “Normal School” in Terre Haute, Indiana, before returning home and working in the late 1930s as a kindergarten volunteer at the Torrence Community Center and other Black-related community service positions such as the Negro Recreation Council.
On February 24, 1941, she gave birth to William Jere Holt. She raised Billy in her parents’ home before marrying Decatur Signal Depot foreman Woods L. McCants in July 1950 and moving to 426 South Broadway. She then worked for many years in the Decatur office of the Illinois Department of Unemployment Insurance. In the 1950s she was also very active in YWCA young adult programs; the Grand Amigos club; and with the Human Freedom Forum. Marian Vanderburg McCants died in Decatur on November 7, 1992, and was buried in St. Peter & Paul Catholic Church Cemetery in Collinsville, Illinois, where her son was living.
Marian’s son, William J. Holt, grew up to be a talented writer who was involved with photography and theater while at the new Eisenhower High School. As a junior in November 1957 he won the Herald & Review’s writing contest for his story about how much he loved walks in the woods with his grandfather Sabe.
In 1995, Millikin University created the Long-Vanderburg Scholarship, named for the schools’ first two African-American graduates, Fred Long and Marian Vanderburg. The LV Scholars Program now recognizes high scholastic achievement among underrepresented students and their allies. Students in the program have demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of social justice through service, leadership and community engagement. The scholarship of $5,000 per year is renewable for up to four years as long as the student maintains a 3.2/4.0 cumulative GPA and actively participates in the program.
Mark Sorensen June 2026
Gertrude Dansby was well-known in the community for her musical ability even before she graduated from Decatur High School in June 1934 and enrolled in Millikin University that fall. While at Millikin she majored in music education, was a member of the university “A Capella Choir,” gave private piano lessons, and directed the choir at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1938, she took a job as the head of the music department at the “colored” Deaf and Blind Institute in Austin, Texas, and soon learned how to teach students to read music using braille.
In June 1942 she married Peoria native John Goin Cheeks. The Decatur newspaper reported that they had five hundred people attend their wedding ceremony at St. Peter’s Church, including her older brother Ellsworth Jr. on leave from the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama. When her husband went into the military, Gertrude moved back to Decatur with their infant twin sons, Dansby and John. After the war she enrolled in graduate school at Millikin University. Even though she was highly proficient on the organ as well as classical piano, she now concentrated on voice. After her graduate recital in Millikin’s Kaeuper Hall in February 1949, the local newspaper reported that an “overflow audience” listened to her sing in Italian, French and English before she finished with “Negro spirituals.” Her Master’s project thesis was titled The Historical Background and Development of the Negro and His Songs, and is still available in the archives of the university library.
John Cheeks had a mortuary science degree in addition to his office experiences, so in April 1947 he opened the Cheeks Funeral Home at 468 South Water Street, the first Black-owned and operated funeral facility in Macon County. The ten-room house allowed the family to live above the business until they sold the facility in November 1955. Gertrude went back to full-time work out of the home in 1958 when she became a special education teacher at Progress School. She later taught for six years at Oglesby School before retiring from Mound Jr. High School in 1980. She was a past president of the Council of Exceptional Children and the first recipient of a Mound School “Master Teacher” award.
Gertrude Dansby Cheeks passed away on April 13, 1998 at the age of eighty-one, and was buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield, IL.
Central Illinois native Bruce K. Hayden, Jr. graduated from Millikin University with a music degree in 1951, and then began his teaching career as Director of the String Department at HBCU Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. After doing freelance violin work in New York City in the 1960s, he finished his career as head of the music department at Malcolm X Community College in Chicago.
Hayden was born in Tuscola, IL, on July 22, 1928, the son of Bruce Kennard Hayden, Sr. and Myrtle Holmes Hayden. His father was a long-time mail carrier in Tuscola, and a U.S. Army World War I veteran. A talented musician, during the war Hayden senior performed in an all-Black singing group which entertained troops in France. Bruce senior was his son’s first violin teacher while Bruce junior’s mother was an excellent pianist who was his accompanist for most of his pre-collegiate career. Known as ‘Brucie’ to Tuscola folks, Hayden Jr. played several musical instruments as well as basketball in school there, and often gave recitals in Champaign where his family were members of the Salem Baptist Church.
Hayden Sr. retired from the Postal Service in 1944 after thirty-two years of walking a mail route and moved the family to Springfield, IL, so that young Bruce could go to school with other Negro teenagers. At Springfield High School he attained all-state honors in violin and clarinet and graduated in June 1946. Having already taken advanced violin lessons from Millikin music professor Harold C. Hess, Hayden entered that university with a scholarship in the fall of 1946. On Sunday afternoon, February 9, 1947, freshman Hayden was part of an interracial vocal quartet from Millikin which sang folk songs for Decatur’s “city-wide brotherhood rally” at First Methodist Church in conjunction with celebrations for the 38th anniversary of the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. On Friday, April 18, 1947, Bruce Hayden was selected to give an opening violin solo in Albert Taylor Hall before a special performance by controversial stage and film star Paul Robeson to an all school assembly.
Hayden graduated from Millikin University with a B.A. in music on January 20, 1951. He immediately started graduate school there, possibly because his soon-to-be June bride, pianist Colleen Dowling, was still a student there. After only one semester of graduate work he received and accepted an offer to head up the string department at Florida A & M University. His tenure was soon interrupted by getting drafted during the Korean War and having to report for army service on September 23, 1952, just six weeks after the birth of the Hayden’s daughter, Carla Diane Hayden. Part of Hayden’s service entailed performing with the 389th regimental band at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, before being discharged on June 23, 1954. Most likely using the G.I. Bill, he returned to Millikin that summer and received his M.A. in music there in 1956.
Bruce Hayden then went back to work at Florida A&M while his wife Colleen taught music at John G. Riley Elementary School in Tallahassee. The family later moved to New York City, where Bruce played jazz violin as a studio musician while Colleen Hayden taught music. Disagreeing about the best environment in which to raise a young child, the Haydens divorced about 1962 and mother and daughter moved to Chicago. Sometime later Bruce Hayden, Jr. also moved to Chicago to play jazz with Cannonball Adderley and other professional orchestras. In the 1970s Hayden became the head of the music department at Malcolm X Community College, and taught music theory and harmony to future R&B performer Lawrence Welton and others. In the late 1960s, Bruce married Patricia Elizabeth “Pat” Gizzard and they had one son, Bruce K Hayden III who was born in Springfield, IL. After a battle with cancer, Bruce K Hayden II passed in Chicago on June 2, 1977, at age forty-eight, and rests with his parents at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, IL. The theater at Malcomb X College was named the Bruce Hayden Auditorium in his honor.
Former Millikin music student Colleen Dowling married Bruce Hayden in June 1951. She graduated with her B.A. degree in Music Education the following summer and later taught school. The Hayden’s daughter, Dr. Carla Diane Hayden, became a librarian in Chicago and was later appointed by President Barack Obama as the Librarian of Congress, serving from September 14, 2016 to May 8, 2025.
Mark W. Sorensen
June 8, 2026
Edwin D. Sheen was the third Black person to graduate from Millikin University, and the first to serve on the staff of the school newspaper and yearbook. He was an excellent student and writer; publicly worked for civil rights for African Americans; and later, taught English at a number of colleges and universities.
Sheen was born in Decatur on January 22, 1902, one of nine children of parents Rev. Charles Hart Sheen and Ellanora Rogan Sheen. Born in the Virgin Islands, Rev. Sheen served as pastor at Decatur’s St. Peter’s A.M.E. church from 1888 to 1903. Mrs. Sheen was the eldest daughter of Isaac Rogan, one of the first Black Decatur Township assistant supervisors. She often served as organist at St. Peter’s. Mrs. Sheen was granted a divorce from her husband in May 1907 because of his alcoholism. After moving with his father to several central Illinois towns, Edwin Sheen returned to Decatur in 1910 for most of his schooling and graduated from high school there in June 1919.
Sheen entered Millikin as a freshman in the fall of 1921, and at the end of his first year won ten dollars “in gold” as the prize for the Dr. John W. Coleman Memorial European History Award. The only Black person in his class of about sixty-four people, in addition to playing two years of intramural basketball, in the spring of 1924 he won ten dollars in second place for the “French Prize” and also placed second for the Della P. Gushard Drama Prize. During his junior year at MU he was a feature writer for both the Decaturian newspaper and the Millidek yearbook. In his senior year, he became the first Black student to be on the editorial staff of the paper as well as the Literary Editor of the yearbook. In October 1924, he had two reviews of stories published in Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League. Edwin Sheen graduated on June 9, 1925, with high honors and a Kappa Key.
Soon after graduation he became a reporter for the Black weekly newspaper, The Chicago Whip, working for ten dollars a week. At the same time in 1925, his short story “Preacher” was published in the official NAACP magazine The Crisis, for which he won a fifty dollar prize. In the fall of 1926 he accepted a three hundred dollar scholarship at the University of Illinois and finished his master’s degree in English there in 1927. He returned to The Chicago Whip for several years and worked his way up to city editor. In August 1929, Sheen took his first teaching job at the prestigious HBCU Howard University in Washington, D.C., teaching English and journalism.
As the Great Depression deepened, many schools had to cut staff and Sheen lost his Howard job in June 1933. The next school year he found work at Bishop College, at that time in Marshall, Texas. He then worked as head of the English department at Samuel Houston College in Austin, Texas; then at Lincoln University, 1935-1936, in Jefferson City, Missouri; next, for two years at Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina; then to Fayetteville State University also in North Carolina; and in 1943 at Prairie View A & M College in Prairie View, Texas, all traditionally HBCU schools. Sheen married Roma Christine Stuart in Harris, Texas, on December 22, 1943, when he was forty-one years old.
Although doing much graduate work at the University of Chicago, Sheen received his PhD in English from the University of Illinois on February 15, 1957, while he was back teaching English at Lincoln University. His doctoral thesis was Leslie Stephen, Man of Letters and Critic of Literature. Stephen was a Victorian intellectual, literary critic, and the founding editor of Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography, as well as the father of novelist Virginia Woolf. Starting in 1958, Dr. Sheen finished his career as assistant professor at today’s West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia. He retired in 1968 and remained living in Institute until his passing in January 1990. He and his wife rest in Decatur’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Mark W. Sorensen
June 25, 2026
Fred McGregory was the first Black man to attend the Millikin Academy, and the first to earn a varsity letter on an MU team. Working in Decatur and Chicago, he was a mechanic, chauffeur, inventor and salesman, and the first Millikin student to secure multiple United States Patents.
Fred was born in Olney, Illinois, to parents James C. McGregory and Sarah Slaughter McGregory on May 19, 1884. The family moved to Decatur in the early 1890s where his father maintained a barber shop at 124 N. Franklin Street. Fred attended Decatur High School where he participated in baseball and track, and then enrolled in the industrial arts area of the Millikin Academy. School records state he was a third-year student in the fall of 1903, the start of MU’s first academic year. In the spring of 1904 he played center field on the school’s first baseball team and was awarded his varsity M. The Decatur newspaper reported that Fred had “the best field record on the varsity.” After one game, the April 7, 1904, The Daily Decatur Review stated: “McGregory, the young colored boy, who officiates in the central garden for the college, pulled down several drives which looked like home runs.”
After leaving the Millikin Academy, McGregory made a living buying and selling properties in Decatur (possibly an early version of flipping houses), working as an auto mechanic, promoting inventions, and beginning in 1909, serving at various times as the chauffeur for wealthy widow Anna Conklin. He also shipped Mrs. Conklin’s auto to California by rail and then joined her there to drive her around the state. On May 25, 1913, The Decatur Herald reported that Fred was with Conklin near Los Angeles and had commented about an auto climb competition of the rugged Mount Washington trail. It is also documented that he chauffeured Mrs. Conklin in California during the winters of 1920-21 and 1921-22.
On January 17, 1916, Fred H. McGregory applied for a U.S. patent for a “Dustless Duster.” That term had been used generically for a number of years and “Howard Dustless Dusters” were marketed greatly around the nation and in newspaper ads in Decatur. But McGregory’s patent application stated that he had “invented new and useful Improvements in Dustless Dusters” and that his product was specifically suitable for wiping automobiles free of dust without harm. Although his patent was not fully approved until June 22, 1920, the Bartlett-Martin auto partnership at 301 East Main Street, sellers of Apperson, Grant and Maxwell autos, took Illinois rights for the product and ordered 50,000 units in April 1916. How and if McGregory could produce such quantities at his business at 245 N. Main Street is unknown, and Bartlett-Martin went out of business that October. However, Decatur City Directories list McGregory as doing “dustless duster” manufacturing through 1923.
In an automotive era before electric turn signals and brake lights, McGregory also came up with a solution which he felt would make driving safer. On April 16, 1916, The Decatur Review printed a lengthy article about his invention which he had already patented on February 2, 1915. Fred McGregory, colored chauffeur for Mrs. A. W. Conklin, has just patented a new traffic signal which promises to become a winner. He is now using the signal on the Conklin car and it has attracted wide attention. By turning a lever near the driver’s seat, his invention would turn a three-part sign above the rear license plate that read STOP, RIGHT, and LEFT, hopefully informing those behind of the driver’s intent. He felt that this would become of increased importance as more and more motorists selected “closed cars” making hand signals more difficult. Ahead of his time, flashing front and rear turn lights did not become standard equipment on American autos until the 1950s.
In September 1924, Fred was involved in a high speed traffic accident north of Urbana. The driver of the other auto was killed and McGregory was charged and arrested. Mrs. Conklin posted his $10,000 bail and it appears that Fred stayed out of jail during subsequent hearings and lawsuits. His mother passed in 1924, and after his father passed in 1932, Fred became a full-time Chicago area resident. He was a salesman for a Ford dealership, and then as G.I.s returned from WW II, a sales representative for the new Parkway Gardens Homes, and later a salesman for a new innovation, aluminum framed replacement windows.
Fred was married to socialite Ellen Brazelton-Smith, but had no children.
Fred McGregory, a man of many talents, passed away in Chicago on October 25, 1960, at the age of seventy-six. He rests in the Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.
I’m proud to have been a Millikin man. Fred Long, December 4, 1950
On May 31, 1918, Fred Thomas Long was the first African American to graduate from Millikin University. He went on to play professional baseball in the newly-formed National Negro Baseball League; teach and coach at several Historically Black Colleges and Universities [HBCUs]; and be enshrined in many athletic halls of fame.
Long was born in Decatur, IL, on January 22, 1896, to parents Hinton O. Long and Idlean Baber Long. His father, “Cook” Long worked at the Decatur Cracker Company and played industrial league baseball on a “colored” team for that factory, and later worked at the Conklin Bakery. Mother Idlean encouraged Fred to excel scholastically and keep going to school. Both parents and their children were very active in Decatur’s Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
Fred started playing baseball as a young boy at Decatur’s Warren Street School, but only on colored teams. At age sixteen he joined the new Junior Excelsior Club and was elected president of the group whose object was “to elevate the young colored people of Decatur.” In June of 1913, he was one of 108 graduates of Decatur High School, the only Black male in that class. He attended Millikin for the 1913-1914 academic year, and then took the fall 1914 semester off, re-entering the university in the spring of 1915. In the fall of 1916, Fred went from being a varsity football substitute to becoming the starting center on the undefeated Illinois Minor College Championship team. Three men from that MU team went on to be part of the 1920 Decatur Staley’s professional team. In the fall of 1917, the local press reported that Long had to miss some away football games because of his duties as chauffeur for Decatur businessman and Millikin supporter Thomas Tenbrooke Roberts. Fred Long also won four varsity letters in baseball while at Millikin.
Long graduated from Millikin with a B.S. in Commerce and Finance. His senior thesis analyzed the population, occupations and education of Negroes in Decatur and was abstracted in the June 2, 1918 issue of the Decatur Review. In July of that year, Long was drafted and sent to Wendell Phillips School in Chicago for special army training for Blacks in motor mechanics, carpentry, and electronics. As World War I was winding down, he served with a segregated motor company in Georgia until being discharged and returned home to Decatur in January 1919. While in the South, he wrote to his brother Harry that he really appreciated the racial acceptance he had while at JMU, and that “Before this war is over, the prejudice crackers will learn that there are some negroes who aspire to be something.” Back in Decatur, Long played some industrial league baseball with the local colored Comet Six team in 1919 and joined the newly formed National Negro League Baseball Detroit Stars for five games in 1920, and eleven games in 1921. Starting in September 1921, he taught and coached for two years at HBCU Paul Quinn College, then located in Waco, Texas. He also returned to Negro League baseball for two more summers, hitting .359 in forty-three games for the Indianapolis ABCs in 1925, and back to the Detroit Stars for sixteen games in 1926 at age thirty.
From 1923 to 1947 he worked at HBCU Wiley College located in Marshall, Texas, where his football teams won eight conference titles in that span and Black College National Football Championships in 1928, 1932 and 1945. During this time Fred married Della Eulalia Wheatley who taught English at the “colored” high school in Marshall, and later at Wiley College. They both received their Master’s degrees from the University of Michigan in 1944. In June 1948, Long, his wife, and several over Wiley faculty and staff were dismissed from their positions most likely because they were thought to have supported a student walkout in the fall of 1947.
Thus, Long moved to Prairie View A&M University in 1948 and then to Texas College in Tyler from 1949 to 1954. In 1950, as athletic director of Texas College, Long contacted Millikin, and several other Illinois colleges that he had competed against, to see if they would host his school’s Negro basketball team. All said yes, and on Monday, December 4, 1950, the first of a series of games was played in Decatur. A banquet was held before the game in Long’s honor and during the game’s halftime, the MU president presented Fred Long with a Millikin blanket with gold stars representing his thirty years of coaching. Decatur Review sports editor Forrest Kyle wrote the next day that: “A Millikin great had come back to his home town, if only briefly, and the memories were good and the compliments sincere. And you knew, again, that one of the great values of athletics lies in the esteem with which athletes hold for one another and it will never be shaken by the prejudices of religion, creed or race.”
Long returned to Wiley in 1956 as head football coach and athletic director until his health issues worsened in 1965. The Fred Thomas Long Student Union Building at that school was later named in his honor. During forty-five years of coaching he compiled at least 224 victories while mentoring twenty-seven All-Americans. In 1962, Long was inducted into the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame; became a charter member of the Millikin University Athletic Hall of Fame in 1970; the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame in 1996; the Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame in 2001; and in 2010 received the American Football Coaches Association (AFCA)'s 2009 Trailblazer Award. He was enshrined in the Black College Football Hall of Fame on June 7, 2025.
After his second heart attack, Fred Long stopped coaching in 1965 and passed on March 23, 1966 at age seventy. He rests in the McJohnsons Cemetery, Marshall, Texas. His wife Della passed on March 4,1959, and rests nearby.
Mark W. Sorensen
May 17, 2026
To keep the brothers straight, Harry was called “Little” Long, an appellation given to two other fine Millikin athletes of about the same era, “Big” and “Little” MacWherter for Kile and Johnny.
Decatur Review sports editor Howard V. Millard, December 17, 1945.
Harry Long was a multiple letterman in football and baseball at Millikin University and the second African American to graduate from that school. He went on to teach at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and became a long-time assistant football coach to his older brother Fred Long.
Long was born in Decatur, IL, on December 28, 1897, the second son of parents Hinton Long and Idlean Baber Long, and brother to the first Black Millikin graduate, Fred Long. His father, “Cook” Long worked at the Decatur Cracker Company and played industrial league baseball on a “colored” team for that factory, and later worked at the Conklin Bakery. Mother Idlean encouraged her sons to excel scholastically and go to college. Both parents and their children were very active in Decatur’s Antioch Missionary Baptist Church.
Harry graduated from Decatur High School in June 1915 and that fall started at Millikin. He played on several teams with his brother, earned varsity letters in both football and baseball, and graduated on June 13, 1919 with twenty other students. [Because of World War I, enrollment was low and only four men were in his class, and Harry was the only Black student in his junior and senior year.] In the summer of 1919 he played baseball with his brother on the local all-Black Comet Six team before becoming the “physical director” at the Evanston, IL, “colored YMCA” that September. In 1920-1921 he had the same type of job at a YMCA in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1921, Harry began working and coaching at HBCU Prairie View State Normal & Industrial College [now Prairie View A&M University] in Prairie View, Texas. On February 4, 1922, he married Eugene “Lela” V. Brown in Bexar, Texas. That fall he moved to teach and coach at HBCU Paul Quinn College [then in Waco, Texas], and in 1925 was the head football coach there when competing against his brother Fred who was the head football coach at Wiley College. Harry worked at HBCU Tennessee State Normal College in 1928-1929 before joining his brother at HBCU Wiley College in Marshall, Texas. Harry served as head of the biology department at Wiley and the football team’s backfield coach, while also getting his master’s degree at Columbia University.
On December 9, 1945, the undefeated Wiley College Wildcats played Florida A & M in Tampa in the Orange Blossom Classic for the national Negro football title. During the game, Harry Long suffered a massive heart attack and died in the ambulance on the way “to the Tampa negro hospital.” Play continued without the team knowing they had lost their coach, and they triumphed 32-6 to secure the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC) and national Negro titles. At the time of his passing, Harry was months away from earning his doctorate from the University of Michigan.
Harry Long was buried in the McJohnsons Cemetery in Marshall, Texas. His wife Eugene was her high school valedictorian, received her master’s degree, worked as a Marshall school teacher and in several college positions, as well as a Trustee of Wiley College, before her passing in 1982. Their daughter, Carolyn Jeanne Long, was born in Waco on August 20, 1927. After attending Wiley and medical school, she became a pediatrician in Austin, Texas. Sadly, she died of a heart attack at age thirty-two in 1960.
Gertrude Dansby was educated in Decatur Public Schools and was involved in many musical events and plays at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After her mother died in 1906, she moved in with her maternal grandmother Martha Gamble at 561 South Franklin Street while attending the James Millikin University Conservatory. Before getting her JMU certificate in 1910, she won several art contests including getting a free Millidek yearbook for the “best head piece” drawing and a first place cash prize for her oil painting of a live model. In 1911 she moved to Chicago by herself and worked as a live-in domestic while attending the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago. She was one of eighty students who graduated from there in June 1914, only a few months after her father died.
On November 19, 1915, she married Decatur hotel porter Wormath Dyer, but received a divorce eleven months later and took back her Dansby name. In late 1916 she took a job teaching and supervising an art studio in Covington, Kentucky. Unfortunately Gertrude suffered from inflammatory rheumatism and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 20, 1920, at only twenty-eight years of age. A few days later the Decatur Review eulogized her stating, “She was probably the most talented colored woman ever a resident of Decatur.” The location of her remains is unknown.
In 1934 Marian Vanderburg was the first Black woman to graduate from Millikin University. She went on to be a teacher, mother, and long-time Decatur counselor.
Marian Vanderburg was born in Decatur, September 7, 1910, the only child of Sabe Vanderburg and Anna Hunt. Sabe was a custodian at Decatur’s Wabash Railroad Station and well-known in the Black community. Anna was very active in clubs and support groups, especially related to church. The Vanderburgs lived at 1188 W. Green Street for their entire adult lives. Marian attended Lincoln School and took piano lessons at the Millikin Conservatory. She graduated from Decatur High School in June 1928, and then attended HBCU Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, for two years where she was a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Marian transferred to Millikin for her last two years of college where she majored in English and minored in French and was active in both of the clubs related to her studies. She graduated with a B.A. on June 5, 1934, along with James Parsons, the only two Black students in their class. The following month, the two of them were featured speakers at Decatur’s Young Negro Republican Club meeting. Marian then attended the “Normal School” in Terre Haute, Indiana, before returning home and working in the late 1930s as a kindergarten volunteer at the Torrence Community Center and other Black-related community service positions such as the Negro Recreation Council.
On February 24, 1941, she gave birth to William Jere Holt. She raised Billy in her parents’ home before marrying Decatur Signal Depot foreman Woods L. McCants in July 1950 and moving to 426 South Broadway. She then worked for many years in the Decatur office of the Illinois Department of Unemployment Insurance. In the 1950s she was also very active in YWCA young adult programs; the Grand Amigos club; and with the Human Freedom Forum. Marian Vanderburg McCants died in Decatur on November 7, 1992, and was buried in St. Peter & Paul Catholic Church Cemetery in Collinsville, Illinois, where her son was living.
Marian’s son, William J. Holt, grew up to be a talented writer who was involved with photography and theater while at the new Eisenhower High School. As a junior in November 1957 he won the Herald & Review’s writing contest for his story about how much he loved walks in the woods with his grandfather Sabe.
In 1995, Millikin University created the Long-Vanderburg Scholarship, named for the schools’ first two African-American graduates, Fred Long and Marian Vanderburg. The LV Scholars Program now recognizes high scholastic achievement among underrepresented students and their allies. Students in the program have demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of social justice through service, leadership and community engagement. The scholarship of $5,000 per year is renewable for up to four years as long as the student maintains a 3.2/4.0 cumulative GPA and actively participates in the program.
Mark Sorensen June 2026
Gertrude Dansby was well-known in the community for her musical ability even before she graduated from Decatur High School in June 1934 and enrolled in Millikin University that fall. While at Millikin she majored in music education, was a member of the university “A Capella Choir,” gave private piano lessons, and directed the choir at St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church. After graduating with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1938, she took a job as the head of the music department at the “colored” Deaf and Blind Institute in Austin, Texas, and soon learned how to teach students to read music using braille.
In June 1942 she married Peoria native John Goin Cheeks. The Decatur newspaper reported that they had five hundred people attend their wedding ceremony at St. Peter’s Church, including her older brother Ellsworth Jr. on leave from the military base in Tuskegee, Alabama. When her husband went into the military, Gertrude moved back to Decatur with their infant twin sons, Dansby and John. After the war she enrolled in graduate school at Millikin University. Even though she was highly proficient on the organ as well as classical piano, she now concentrated on voice. After her graduate recital in Millikin’s Kaeuper Hall in February 1949, the local newspaper reported that an “overflow audience” listened to her sing in Italian, French and English before she finished with “Negro spirituals.” Her Master’s project thesis was titled The Historical Background and Development of the Negro and His Songs, and is still available in the archives of the university library.
John Cheeks had a mortuary science degree in addition to his office experiences, so in April 1947 he opened the Cheeks Funeral Home at 468 South Water Street, the first Black-owned and operated funeral facility in Macon County. The ten-room house allowed the family to live above the business until they sold the facility in November 1955. Gertrude went back to full-time work out of the home in 1958 when she became a special education teacher at Progress School. She later taught for six years at Oglesby School before retiring from Mound Jr. High School in 1980. She was a past president of the Council of Exceptional Children and the first recipient of a Mound School “Master Teacher” award.
Gertrude Dansby Cheeks passed away on April 13, 1998 at the age of eighty-one, and was buried at Camp Butler National Cemetery in Springfield, IL.
Central Illinois native Bruce K. Hayden, Jr. graduated from Millikin University with a music degree in 1951, and then began his teaching career as Director of the String Department at HBCU Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. After doing freelance violin work in New York City in the 1960s, he finished his career as head of the music department at Malcolm X Community College in Chicago.
Hayden was born in Tuscola, IL, on July 22, 1928, the son of Bruce Kennard Hayden, Sr. and Myrtle Holmes Hayden. His father was a long-time mail carrier in Tuscola, and a U.S. Army World War I veteran. A talented musician, during the war Hayden senior performed in an all-Black singing group which entertained troops in France. Bruce senior was his son’s first violin teacher while Bruce junior’s mother was an excellent pianist who was his accompanist for most of his pre-collegiate career. Known as ‘Brucie’ to Tuscola folks, Hayden Jr. played several musical instruments as well as basketball in school there, and often gave recitals in Champaign where his family were members of the Salem Baptist Church.
Hayden Sr. retired from the Postal Service in 1944 after thirty-two years of walking a mail route and moved the family to Springfield, IL, so that young Bruce could go to school with other Negro teenagers. At Springfield High School he attained all-state honors in violin and clarinet and graduated in June 1946. Having already taken advanced violin lessons from Millikin music professor Harold C. Hess, Hayden entered that university with a scholarship in the fall of 1946. On Sunday afternoon, February 9, 1947, freshman Hayden was part of an interracial vocal quartet from Millikin which sang folk songs for Decatur’s “city-wide brotherhood rally” at First Methodist Church in conjunction with celebrations for the 38th anniversary of the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. On Friday, April 18, 1947, Bruce Hayden was selected to give an opening violin solo in Albert Taylor Hall before a special performance by controversial stage and film star Paul Robeson to an all school assembly.
Hayden graduated from Millikin University with a B.A. in music on January 20, 1951. He immediately started graduate school there, possibly because his soon-to-be June bride, pianist Colleen Dowling, was still a student there. After only one semester of graduate work he received and accepted an offer to head up the string department at Florida A & M University. His tenure was soon interrupted by getting drafted during the Korean War and having to report for army service on September 23, 1952, just six weeks after the birth of the Hayden’s daughter, Carla Diane Hayden. Part of Hayden’s service entailed performing with the 389th regimental band at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, before being discharged on June 23, 1954. Most likely using the G.I. Bill, he returned to Millikin that summer and received his M.A. in music there in 1956.
Bruce Hayden then went back to work at Florida A&M while his wife Colleen taught music at John G. Riley Elementary School in Tallahassee. The family later moved to New York City, where Bruce played jazz violin as a studio musician while Colleen Hayden taught music. Disagreeing about the best environment in which to raise a young child, the Haydens divorced about 1962 and mother and daughter moved to Chicago. Sometime later Bruce Hayden, Jr. also moved to Chicago to play jazz with Cannonball Adderley and other professional orchestras. In the 1970s Hayden became the head of the music department at Malcolm X Community College, and taught music theory and harmony to future R&B performer Lawrence Welton and others. In the late 1960s, Bruce married Patricia Elizabeth “Pat” Gizzard and they had one son, Bruce K Hayden III who was born in Springfield, IL. After a battle with cancer, Bruce K Hayden II passed in Chicago on June 2, 1977, at age forty-eight, and rests with his parents at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, IL. The theater at Malcomb X College was named the Bruce Hayden Auditorium in his honor.
Former Millikin music student Colleen Dowling married Bruce Hayden in June 1951. She graduated with her B.A. degree in Music Education the following summer and later taught school. The Hayden’s daughter, Dr. Carla Diane Hayden, became a librarian in Chicago and was later appointed by President Barack Obama as the Librarian of Congress, serving from September 14, 2016 to May 8, 2025.
Mark W. Sorensen
June 8, 2026
Edwin D. Sheen was the third Black person to graduate from Millikin University, and the first to serve on the staff of the school newspaper and yearbook. He was an excellent student and writer; publicly worked for civil rights for African Americans; and later, taught English at a number of colleges and universities.
Sheen was born in Decatur on January 22, 1902, one of nine children of parents Rev. Charles Hart Sheen and Ellanora Rogan Sheen. Born in the Virgin Islands, Rev. Sheen served as pastor at Decatur’s St. Peter’s A.M.E. church from 1888 to 1903. Mrs. Sheen was the eldest daughter of Isaac Rogan, one of the first Black Decatur Township assistant supervisors. She often served as organist at St. Peter’s. Mrs. Sheen was granted a divorce from her husband in May 1907 because of his alcoholism. After moving with his father to several central Illinois towns, Edwin Sheen returned to Decatur in 1910 for most of his schooling and graduated from high school there in June 1919.
Sheen entered Millikin as a freshman in the fall of 1921, and at the end of his first year won ten dollars “in gold” as the prize for the Dr. John W. Coleman Memorial European History Award. The only Black person in his class of about sixty-four people, in addition to playing two years of intramural basketball, in the spring of 1924 he won ten dollars in second place for the “French Prize” and also placed second for the Della P. Gushard Drama Prize. During his junior year at MU he was a feature writer for both the Decaturian newspaper and the Millidek yearbook. In his senior year, he became the first Black student to be on the editorial staff of the paper as well as the Literary Editor of the yearbook. In October 1924, he had two reviews of stories published in Opportunity, the journal of the National Urban League. Edwin Sheen graduated on June 9, 1925, with high honors and a Kappa Key.
Soon after graduation he became a reporter for the Black weekly newspaper, The Chicago Whip, working for ten dollars a week. At the same time in 1925, his short story “Preacher” was published in the official NAACP magazine The Crisis, for which he won a fifty dollar prize. In the fall of 1926 he accepted a three hundred dollar scholarship at the University of Illinois and finished his master’s degree in English there in 1927. He returned to The Chicago Whip for several years and worked his way up to city editor. In August 1929, Sheen took his first teaching job at the prestigious HBCU Howard University in Washington, D.C., teaching English and journalism.
As the Great Depression deepened, many schools had to cut staff and Sheen lost his Howard job in June 1933. The next school year he found work at Bishop College, at that time in Marshall, Texas. He then worked as head of the English department at Samuel Houston College in Austin, Texas; then at Lincoln University, 1935-1936, in Jefferson City, Missouri; next, for two years at Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina; then to Fayetteville State University also in North Carolina; and in 1943 at Prairie View A & M College in Prairie View, Texas, all traditionally HBCU schools. Sheen married Roma Christine Stuart in Harris, Texas, on December 22, 1943, when he was forty-one years old.
Although doing much graduate work at the University of Chicago, Sheen received his PhD in English from the University of Illinois on February 15, 1957, while he was back teaching English at Lincoln University. His doctoral thesis was Leslie Stephen, Man of Letters and Critic of Literature. Stephen was a Victorian intellectual, literary critic, and the founding editor of Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography, as well as the father of novelist Virginia Woolf. Starting in 1958, Dr. Sheen finished his career as assistant professor at today’s West Virginia State College in Institute, West Virginia. He retired in 1968 and remained living in Institute until his passing in January 1990. He and his wife rest in Decatur’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Mark W. Sorensen
June 25, 2026
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