Reginald Cummings was outside of the Platinum club in downtown Birmingham as alumni of Birmingham’s West End High School celebrated inside.

Cummings, a member of the West End Class of 1986, was selling West End-themed T-shirts to fellow alumni. And while sales were brisk, the salesman was most excited about being among dozens of loyal Lions.

“It’s nice for everybody to get back together,” he said, “as a friend, family friend, to meet each other.”

Many of the shirts that Cummings sold said, “Ain’t No School Like The One I Got,” which was a play off of a 1972 song by the Four Tops.

The shirts could have just as easily read “the one I had” as that high school is no more. But alumni annually get together to commemorate their alma mater, most recently during West End Alumni Week July 19-27.

The school’s red-brick building was completed in 1930. It had its times in the spotlight.

In 1963, a boycott of the school by white students took place after two Black students tried to register for classes. Those who boycotted shouted “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.” The boycott ended in a week.

And on June 27, 1982, West End alumnus and NASA shuttle pilot Henry W. Hartsfield carried a West End banner into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.

The school’s end came under a consolidation plan approved by the Birmingham Board of Education in February 2008. West End High School was closed during the summer of 2008, with students transferring to Wenonah High School, A. H. Parker High School and Jackson-Olin High School.

The closing of West End High was marked by a ceremony with a parade, pep rally, picnic and alumni basketball game. The school was torn down and eventually replaced by West End Academy, a grades PreK-5 school.

Alumni of the school continued to host an annual picnic after the school closed, and event that grew to become the West End Alumni Week. This year the week included a pair of parties where everyone wore white outfits, another where everyone wore black, an alumni basketball game at West End Academy, Tasty Tuesday at Platinum club, Karaoke Night, an alumni choir gospel concert and the annual picnic at McLendon Park outside Legion Field.

Twanisha Brooks directed the alumni chorus. The 41-year-old member of the Class of 2002 said the first alumni choir performed in 2003 when former choir director Alona Cunningham brought several of her former students to sing at Mount Calvary Baptist Church.

“We later did it again five years later, in 2008, when the school closed down,” Brooks said. “I began to direct the alumni choir in 2023. We did it that year and we did it this year, and the choir has voted for us to do it every year. We’ll be doing it again next.”

Cunningham was the choir director at the high school from 1994 to 2008, succeeding Danielean Myricks.

Carlotta Shearer has worked with the alumni association’s reunion celebration the past 14, the past two years as president.

“I’m still bleeding orange and blue,” the Class of 1989 member said. “I’m still a mighty lion to the day my children put me in the ground.”