Dr. Harold A. Franklin

This marks the legacy of Doctor Harold Alonza Franklin, the man who broke the color line at Auburn University. In nineteen sixty-four, after suing the school for excluding him because of his race, Franklin signed his name inside the university library and became Auburn's first Black student.

The welcome was cold. To keep white students from any contact with him, the university emptied an entire wing of a dormitory so he would live alone. He persevered, then built a long career as a college educator, teaching history at schools including Tuskegee, Alabama State, and North Carolina A and T.

He died in twenty twenty-one at the age of eighty-eight. Decades after he registered, Auburn eventually honored him as its first Black student, at the library where he first walked in and changed the school forever.