West End High School, located in the Oakland Community, was the first high school for African-Americans in western Lauderdale County and the second in the county as a whole. It became operational during the 1956-57 school year with grades 1-10, and in 1957 its name was changed from Oakland Junior High to West End High School, expanding to grades 1-12 and adopting the Trojans as its mascot. Its origins are believed to trace to Galilee M.B. Church, established in the late 1800s in a brush harbor west of the site, where African-American children were taught when no schools were available to them. After the church moved to the Oakland Community in the early 1900s, a local citizen provided a building for classroom instruction, and funds from Julius Rosenwald of New York allowed the Board of Education to buy 3.5 acres and build a two-classroom school with one teacher and a principal. As enrollment grew, more land was acquired, the school became Oakland School, then in 1945 Oakland Junior High with grades 1-9, and in 1956 two classrooms and a cafeteria were added to serve five neighboring elementary schools. In 1958, two more classrooms and a library were added, home economics and music entered the curriculum, and the first senior class graduated in 1959 with 14 students. A gymnasium was built in 1962, and the first basketball game was played there in 1963. In May 1961, the Lauderdale County Board of Education announced that beginning with the 1965-66 school year, the county's nine African-American schools would be consolidated into two, with West End serving students from the western part of the county. After consolidation, West End High School had 14 teachers and 307 students. During its years as an accredited high school, it graduated a total of 211 students. In the 1965-66 school year, the student body was integrated under a desegregation court order. The school closed at the end of the 1969 school year, and its students transferred the following year to Central and Waterloo Schools. Afterward, the facilities were sold, used for furniture manufacturing, and later destroyed by fire.