Over the weekend, the City of Auburn came together to celebrate Juneteenth, with a Friday night parade ending at J.F. Drake Middle School — which was once the high school for Black students in the Auburn community during segregation.
For 12 years, J.F. Drake High School, formerly known as the Lee County Training School, educated the Black children of the community before the high school integrated with Auburn High School in 1970.
The school was small, with just 12 classrooms, a gymnasium, kitchen and a band room/storage room, and Samantha Johnson said that it was a tight-knit community. Johnson graduated with the class of 1969, the penultimate graduating class before the school closed after the 1970 graduation and the students made the move to Auburn High School for the 1970-1971 school year. Graduates of J.
F. Drake High School. "We just had that family atmosphere.
Our class, after 55 years, we still have reunions and we still get together," Johnson said. "We just all got along, you know, everybody just got along." Elizabeth Chandler, class of 1965, echoed Johnson's sentiment and said that she and many of her classmates grew up together.
She said there aren't as many reunions for her class anymore, because she does not have many classmates left. Chandler was a bit of a renaissance woman at Drake and was involved in several clubs and activities such as the choir, cheerleading, drama club and even the French club. Looking back almost 60 years since she graduated, Chandler sai.
