Greetings, Panthers, and greetings to all our friends.

My name is Leroy Mitchell, Class of 1952, and I serve as corresponding secretary of the Longleaf High School Alumni Association. I was born in the Pee Dee section of South Carolina in 1934 and went to Longleaf from the first grade to the last. When I came out of the Army in 1955 I came up to Philadelphia, as so many of us did, and I carried the mail in West Philadelphia for thirty-four years. I have been retired since 1990. My wife Minnie and I have been married forty-two years, and she has been a Panther by marriage for every one of them, and she will tell you she has earned it.

For many years my duty was to write letters: to find our classmates, to tell them of the reunion, to tell them when we had lost someone. I still write the letters. But my grandson showed me that a great many of our children and grandchildren now look for things on the computer, so this page is another kind of letter, to the whole family at once. Welcome. Please sign in by e-mail, and tell us your class.

We have come home every two years since 1977, and this year we came home again: four hundred and twelve Panthers and their families, from Philadelphia, New York and Newark, Washington, Detroit, Atlanta, California and right down the road. We gathered for the banquet on Saturday, September 4, 1999, worshiped together on Sunday at the church where our school began, and on Labor Day we spread our tablecloths on the old school grounds and ate until we could not eat any more, and the old band played, and the children ran where we used to run.

The oldest Panther with us was Mrs. Ida McKinney, Class of 1929, who is 88 and rode the chapter bus down from Philadelphia, all eleven hours of it, and was the last to leave the dance floor Saturday night. Our former principal, Mr. James Grant, now 75, spoke at the banquet, and when he finished there was not a dry eye in that room, mine included.

The full account, with the honored classes and those we remembered, is in the 1999 Reunion Report.

Our teachers gave us everything they had and asked only that we pass it on. The scholarship fund is how we try to keep that promise. Since 1983 we have awarded scholarships to graduating seniors from back home who are the children and grandchildren of Panthers, or who simply need the help and have earned it. This year's recipients, announced at the banquet:

At the reunion the four chapters brought in their gifts, and the fund now stands at $48,750. The figures are in the reunion report. Our goal is fifty thousand dollars by the next reunion, so that the interest alone can send a child to college every year. We are close, Panthers. We are very close.

Longleaf was built in 1923 by people who had very little and gave it anyway. The farmers of our community each pledged a bale of cotton. The women held suppers and sales. The men cut the timber and raised the walls. With that money and that labor, and a grant from the Rosenwald Fund, which helped Black communities across the South build their own schools, the Longleaf school opened its doors in the fall of 1923 under a young principal named Ervin Pressley, who stayed for thirty-five years.

For forty-seven years Longleaf gave us teachers who would not let us fail, a band that could make a parade stop and listen, and the knowledge that we were somebody. In 1970, when the schools of our county were finally integrated, Longleaf High School was closed. The building stands. Today it is our community center, and every two years, it is ours again for a day.

The whole story, and the teachers who made us, is on the History & Our Teachers page.

We went north for work, a great many of us, in the forties and fifties and sixties, and we took Longleaf with us. Today we have four chapters, and all Panthers and their families are welcome at any of them.

Association officers, elected at the 1999 reunion: President, Mr. Thomas Aldridge, '53; Vice President, Mrs. Gwendolyn Walston, '67; Treasurer, Mr. Edward Logsdon, '61; Recording Secretary, Mrs. Joyce Guthrie, '50; Corresponding Secretary, Leroy Mitchell, '52; Scholarship Chair, Mrs. Kathleen Baker, '58; Chaplain, the Reverend Herbert Greer, '32.

Every class from 1928 to 1970 has, or should have, a class representative, who keeps the addresses and passes along the news. Some classes are still searching for their members, and some have no representative at all. Please look at the Class Representatives page. If you see your class without a name beside it, that name could be yours.

1999 Reunion Report · History & Our Teachers · Class Representatives

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since our page opened on Easter Sunday, April 4, 1999

Write to the corresponding secretary, Leroy Mitchell: [email protected]
Please give your name, your class, and the name you went by in school.

Last updated September 18, 1999