INSIDER Magazine: African American Heritage Trail Unveiled

By Rebecca Bigelow

Local Black history and the history of campus intersect in Champaign-Urbana. It’s no wonder then that several stops on the Champaign County African American Heritage Trail tell the story of both. The trail committee collaborated with the university to ensure that several of these stories are memorialized around campus.

Brent Lewis, university landscape architect, and Don Gerard, construction project coordinator represented F&S in the planning and execution phases, offering significant support to the work. Lewis is part of the Architectural Review Committee, which vetted the sign information and layout, and helped coordinate University of Illinois branding.

Lewis explained that F&S helped to facilitate placement of the various signs. For example, the sign honoring Maudelle Tanner Brown Bousfield, the first African American woman to enroll at and graduate from the university, is outside Bousfield Hall. Installation was completed by F&S laborers and cement finishers. The sign, which measures approximately 2 feet by 3 feet, is printed with the same information on the front and the reverse; it includes the trail’s logo, pictures of Bousfield, historical notes about her accomplishments, the university’s wordmark as a project partner of the sign, and a QR code that people can use to access more information about Bousfield. As part of the plan, there were detailed instructions for installing the new signs, including exact location and the engineering details that outline how the sign’s base was to be constructed so that the sign can withstand a 115 mile per hour wind.

Additional trail locations on campus include the following:

  • Bruce D. Nesbitt African American Cultural Center. (Location: small interior plaque placed in BNAACC; Nesbitt photo above, right)
  • Walter Thomas Bailey and Beverly Lorraine Greene, the first Black man and woman to graduate with degrees in architecture (Location: large single-sided sign outside Temple Hoyne Buell Hall)
  • Albert R. Lee was the second Black person hired by the university. He was a clerk in the Office of the President, serving under six presidents. He became the de facto dean of African American students when he became the go-to resource for Black students attending the university. (Location: second floor by the west stairwell in the Student Dining and Residential Programs Building)
  • William Frank Earnest was a promising student who enlisted in the Illinois National Guard in May 1917. Sadly, he was the university’s first Black student to be killed in World War I; he is also memorialized on a column in Memorial Stadium. (Location: larger double-sided sign placed near Grange Grove)
  • Project 500 was a program designed to increase minority enrollment at the university. In 1967, for example, only 59 African American undergrads were studying at the U of I. Project 500 aimed to enroll 500+ African Americans and People of Color each year. (Location: larger sign placed inside the Illini Union at the west entrance)