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. 

Family legend recalls that at age twelve in 1927, he had become good friends with a pair of brothers whose family owned a plane and whose father had seen to it that they had flying lessons. One day when the parents weren’t home, Ellsworth visited and wanted to watch them fly near Dalton City. One of them took the plane up and, after he had landed, told Ellsworth, “Now it’s your turn.” Although he had never flown an actual plane before, he had read everything he could about how things worked. He climbed in and took off in the one-seater plane. According to the story later told by his wife, “he had no trouble flying. However, he hadn’t read the part about landing. But he figured that if he flew the plane down to the ground and cut the engine, it would work, and it did.” 

By 1929, “Danny,” as he was known to his friends, was active in the YMCA on the southeast corner of West Prairie and Church Street, and by July 1930 he was helping teach model airplane building and flying there.  As a member of the YMCA R.O.G (Rise Off the Ground) Club and Y-Fliers Club, in the next few years he won several local contests for both design and length of flight of his model gliders and planes.

With his family now living on South Haworth Street, 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. Growing up he was involved with St. Peter’s A.M.E. Church where his mother Luella was often in charge of musical, drama and social productions. While his younger sister Gertrude was known for her scholarship and great musical talent, and his younger brother Robert for his athletic prowess, Ellsworth Jr. was known for his mechanical aptitude and motorcycle riding.  However, as a young man he also appeared in various ways on stage – as a “slave” in the May 1930 Roosevelt Jr. High production of Aladdin; in May 1930 at Decatur High and February 1932 at Millikin as “Justice” in his mother’s production of Ethiopia, a history of the Negro race; and as the servant in Oh Doctor, the March 1933 spring musical at Decatur High School.

Ellsworth was also involved with and served as a leader in The Boys’ Advancement Club, “a group of older colored boys … prominent in community activities among their race” that promoted the “study of Christian citizenship” through lectures, discussion, debates and plays.  Organized in 1929, they affiliated with the YMCA in February 1932.

After high school graduation Ellsworth worked part-time at a number of odd jobs and in the late 1930s enrolled sporadically in some classes at Millikin University. 

Because he was Black, he could find no official flying school that would accept him as a student.  He stated that while he worked for the Bell Telephone Company that he was able to take private flying lessons from Carl Lewis at the old west-side Decatur airport, solo, obtain nearly 100 hours of flying time, but not receive his pilot’s license.  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. 

After extensive training, the 99th arrived in North Africa in April 1943.   That summer Dansby was quoted in the Chicago Defender stating: “Being out here with this gang and doing this work is something I’ve hoped for all my life.  This has just got to be the best outfit in the world.  I think it will be as soon as we have a chance to prove ourselves.”  Ellsworth Dansby, Jr. had already become the first Black Master Sergeant in the Army Air Corps and was a line chief who supervised seventy-five mechanics, technicians and specialist who were responsible for keeping several different types of fighter bombers flying in all types of conditions.  

Dansby’s unit was moved to Sicily in October 1943 and then south of Rome in early 1944 as the Associated Press reported that “Flight officers of other outfits say the 99th Negro maintenance crew is ‘probably the best in the air force’.”  

Black-related newspapers closely followed the exploits of the 99th and on May 13, 1944 the New Journal and Guide, out of Norfolk, Virginia, reported that squad’s “ace mechanic,” Sgt. Dansby, was on the air in a CBS radio broadcast a few days earlier and that their reporter had alerted his parents in Decatur, Illinois, ahead of time so that they could hear their son for the first time in three years.  Another article in September 1944 explained that unit’s pilots had mostly changed from P-40s to the P-51 Mustang and were being serviced by excellent ground crews led by Dansby.

As the war in Europe ended, the 99th had become part of the larger all-Black 332 Group Air Corps.  On June 9, 1945 the New Journal and Guide again praised the unit’s ground crews and reported that Dansby, “who is deeply and sincerely respected by every pilot and ground man in the pioneering squadron for his work,” had just received the Bronze Star.  His other awards included nine major battle campaign ribbons and two Presidential Unit Citations. That fall Ellsworth Dansby, Jr. returned to the states and was mustered out of service in October 1945.  His unit had become known as the Tuskegee Airmen and their fighter bombers known as the “red tails.” Their success in combat missions across Europe, North Africa, and the Mediterranean helped pave the way for the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948.

After the war Dansby returned to Decatur and lived with his family while helping his father with his dental laboratory business at 158 East Main Street.  He immediately became active and a leader in the local Black-member Harry Warfield American Legion Post, as well as in 1947 in the Decatur Community Council to improve race relations. He also got his airplane pilot’s license was reported to have flown “his own plane” from Decatur in May 1948 to a conference in Indianapolis. On September 24, 1949 he married a white woman, Eunice Lillith Heideman, in Chicago, and for several years worked at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois.

When his father became ill in the early 1950s, Ellsworth Jr. returned to Decatur to assist with the operation of the dental laboratory and other businesses.

After his father’s death, that business closed and in 1964 Dansby began work as a laboratory mechanic at Decatur’s Marvel Schebler Division of the Borg-Warner Corporation.  He quickly advanced to lab technician, engineer in the mechanical engineering test group, mechanical technician, and finally by 1968 as a contracts administrator for the Nuclear Control Rod Division of that company.  At the same time he became more involved with issues related to civil rights.

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.” This plan entailed “cross-town” busing of 3,863 students in the 1969-1970 school-year in order to achieve greater racial balance in all schools instead of some having almost all Black students while others had almost all white students.  Dansby had earlier stated that “We can’t afford segregation because it is based on falsely contrived concepts.  If whites, Negroes and members of all minority groups are going to live together in harmony, they must learn to do it in the schools.  Integration is not for the benefit of Negroes or any one race, but for all.”

However, the next school board election brought on a more conservative group who tried to reverse what had just been passed.  On January 27, 1971, Dansby announced that he would not seek a second term due to so much discord on the Board and in the community.  He later explained that “It has long been my firm conviction that Decatur is potentially the greatest community in the country.  But … resistance to change, institutional racism and lack of concern for one another is – not so slowly – making us impotent.  I won’t be a candidate because I don’t believe Decatur is ready or wants to solve its problems in education.”

In the next few years before his retirement from Borg-Warner he spent time flying and participating with the Experimental Aircraft Association.  His son remembers that Ellsworth Jr. would take the wings off his plane at the airport, tow the plane home, and store it in their Tuttle Street home garage.  Dansby became Director for “Project Equality” of Illinois and Indiana – which dealt with fair employment practices, and he also served as president of the Decatur-Macon County Opportunities Corp.  In September 1981 he was appointed by the Decatur City Council to the Human Relations Committee.  At a public meeting on October14, 1981, he showed his frustration with the slow progress in the community of Blacks obtaining full civil rights. He opined that “The commission is too damn quiet.  Racism in Decatur is rampant.  It is as bad now, or worse in many ways, than it ever was.  We have to take positive steps to let people know who we are.”

After several years of declining health, he had a heart attack at home and passed on Sunday morning, June 4, 1989.  The local newspaper remembered him as a champion of civil rights and a man who broke several barriers.  When Dansby died at the age of seventy-four, Decatur City Councilman William F. Oliver reflected that he was “a role model for this community who will be sorely missed.  It is a shame those of a younger age never got to know him.  He was a unique individual who always bragged about his home town.”