PHOTO | TROY HULL

West Charlotte High School alumni and supporters gathered Saturday to bid farewell to the campus at 2219 Senior Drive. The current campus will be emptied on June 8 and transferred to a new site next door.

West Charlotte High School is literally family to Willus Woodard.

A 1989 graduate, Woodard followed the footsteps of his mother, Valerie, a 1970 graduate who went on to become a Mecklenburg County commissioner. His sister is a 1994 graduate. Although West Charlotte’s moving to a new campus a few feet away its 2219 Senior Drive location, the memories – and history – are personal.

“It’s out with the old and in with the new, but you’re talking about 84 years of history,” said Woodard, an assistant coach on Lions basketball teams that won 2011 and 2022 state boys’  championships. “If you think about it, all of us – our parents, grandparents, everyone – played in that gym, everyone went to that school, everyone walked this campus. Everyone wants this.”

Alumni and supporters gathered last week to share the past as the school transitions to the new campus. The buildings will be emptied on June 8, but West Charlotte’s legacy lives on.

“What connects West Charlotte High School is the history and the legacy that it was founded upon,” said 1978 graduate Cheryl McCullough, a speech pathologist and minister who lives in Goldsboro. “It had such deep roots of African Americans and then with integration our counterparts came in, but we still keep that family bond. West Charlotte, even though we come from diversity, we still have a bond of friendship and love that will transcend time.”

In the fall, West Charlotte will open a new chapter with its state-of-the-art facility. The upgrades in technology will benefit not only students but the surrounding community, which is as much of the legacy as accomplished alumni. Luminaries ranging from former Dallas Cowboys tight end Pettis Norman and Chicago Bulls forward Patrick Williams to former U.S. Transportation Secretary and Charlotte Mayor Antony Foxx and the late Ruth Samuelson, who represented Charlotte in the North Carolina House of Representatives are all graduates.

“We owed it to the community to do something of adequate magnitude to honor the legacy of West Charlotte High,” Principal Donevin Hoskins said.

West Charlotte, founded in 1938 as an all-Black school at the site of the current Northwest School of the Arts, moved to Senior Drive in 1954 – the year the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in Swann v. Board of Education. Seventeen years later, West Charlotte became the epicenter of busing for desegregation after the court’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education decision brought white students to campus. Although enrollment demographics have shifted in terms of race and demographics over the years, the school remains a source of pride across generations.

“What has made with Charlotte High School so special is that this is a family,” McCullough said. “It has such a rich history in the African American community … through the years and through the generations here today. We’ve seen people from classes from the ‘50s on up to the 2000s [at the reunion]. We’re all family, even though we may not know each other.”

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