What follows is our history as it was told to me by my elders, as I lived part of it, and as I have been able to confirm it in the old county newspapers, the minutes of our mother church, and the memories of our oldest Panthers. If you know something I have left out, please write. History belongs to everybody who was there.

Before there was a Longleaf school, the Black children of our community were taught in the sanctuary of our mother church, a few months of the year, between planting and harvest, by whatever teacher the county would send and the church could board. The children sat on the pews and wrote on slates in their laps. The county spent a great deal more on each white child than on each of us, which was the law and the custom across the South in those years, and everyone knew it. Our grandparents decided they would not wait for the county to do right. They would build a school themselves.

They raised the money the hard way. Every farm family pledged a bale of cotton, or its price, from the 1922 crop. The women of the church held suppers every Saturday for a year. The men cut pine timber from their own land and gave their labor on the building after their own day's work was done. A white landowner sold two acres for the school at a fair price, which was not a small thing in that time.

Then they applied for help from the Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald was the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago, and in the 1910s he began working with Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute to help Black communities in the South build schools. The Fund did not simply give a school away. It paid part of the cost, and only if the community raised its share and the public school authorities put up theirs and agreed to run the school. By the time the program ended in the early 1930s, it had helped build more than five thousand schools, shops and teachers' homes in fifteen Southern states, hundreds of them in South Carolina alone. Ours was one of them.

The school was built from one of the Fund's plans, with tall windows set to catch the most daylight, because most of our homes and our church had no electric lights, and neither would the school for many years. It opened in the fall of 1923 with four classrooms, an auditorium with a stage, and a young principal named Ervin Pressley, twenty-two years old and just out of college in Orangeburg. The first class to finish the high school course graduated in 1927. There were five of them.

The school grew as the community grew. A vocational agriculture shop was added in 1938, and a home economics cottage after the war. Professor Pressley went to the county board every year for more teachers, more books and more buses, and some years he got them. Our books were often the ones the white school had used up and sent over, with other children's names written inside the covers. Our teachers taught us from them anyway, and taught us that the names in the covers did not matter, and that what was in our heads would be ours forever.

In January of 1954 we moved into a new brick building. In those years the state of South Carolina built a great many new schools for Black children, as the court case that began in Clarendon County, not so far from us, made its way to the Supreme Court. The new schools were meant to show that separate could be equal. We got a better building out of it, with a gymnasium and a library and electric lights in every room, and we were grateful for it. The Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education that May anyway.

But the decision did not come to our county for a long time. In the middle sixties the county offered what it called "freedom of choice," and a few brave young people from Longleaf chose to go to the white high school. It was very hard on them, and we honor them.

Mr. Willie Mack came home from the Army in 1946 and to Longleaf in 1947, and he started the band that fall with fourteen children and secondhand instruments the community bought with the proceeds of a barbecue. The mothers sewed the first uniforms, royal blue with white braid. By 1952, my senior year, the Panther band was sixty strong and the pride of the county, and when it came down the street in the Christmas parade, high-stepping in the blue and white, the white folks along the curb stopped talking to watch. Mr. Mack directed that band for twenty-three years, until the last day. We lost him last November, at eighty. His drum major from 1955 led the old band for him at the 1999 picnic.

In 1970, sixteen years after Brown, and under the order of a federal court, the schools of our county were finally integrated, all at once. Longleaf High School graduated its last class in May of 1970, and in the fall the high school students went to the formerly white high school across town. Our principal, Mr. Grant, became an assistant principal there, as happened to a great many of our principals across the South. Some of our teachers went with the students. Some were let go.

We have been asked many times whether integration was a good thing. It was right, and it was the law, and our children have had chances we did not have. But something was lost too, and those of us who were there know what it was. We lost our school. We lost teachers who knew our families and would come to our houses if we didn't do our homework. We lost our name, our colors and our band. Our trophy case was packed into boxes and we never learned where it went, until a man found two of our football trophies in a county storeroom in 1994 and brought them home to us. They are in the alumni room now.

The building today. For some years after 1970 the brick building was used by the county for the lower grades, and then it stood empty. In 1991 the county agreed to let the Home Chapter and the community open it again as the Longleaf Community Center. Today it has a lunch program for our seniors, a Head Start classroom, a Saturday tutoring program run by retired teachers, and one room that is ours, with the trophies, the class photographs, a band uniform in a glass case, and the old school bell. Every two years, on Labor Day, the whole school is ours again.

We could not list them all. These are the ones whose names come up first, every time two Panthers sit down together. If your teacher is not here, write and tell me about him or her, and I will add them.