Sixty years ago today, Harold Franklin became the first Black student to attend Auburn University – though he would not receive his degree until decades later, in 2020.

Isolated and under heavy guard, Franklin arrived on Auburn’s campus on Jan. 4, 1964. Officials had previously rejected his application, but with the help of the NAACP, he successfully sued the college in 1963, making Auburn the third state college to desegregate.

Franklin died in 2021 at the age of 88.

“I won two cases against them,” Franklin told AL.com in a 2019 interview. “I was a 31-year-old married agitator. George Wallace was governor. I don’t have to tell you what he was like.”

Franklin, a Tuskegee native, had recently graduated from the historically Black Alabama State College and, inspired by the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, had dreams of attending law school one day.

It was attorney Fred Gray who initially encouraged Franklin to work on a master’s at Auburn – but it would take some convincing.

“I don’t want to go to a cow college,” Franklin’s son, Harold Franklin Jr., recalled his father telling Gray at the time.

But eventually Franklin agreed to join Gray’s class-action suit, and after two years of court proceedings, he would become the first Black student to successfully register at the school.

“It proved to him something that he already knew,” Franklin’s nephew, Melvin Bolton, told the school’s alumni association in 2021. “And that was that whatever he set his mind to, he could achieve.”

An ‘incomplete’ year

Franklin’s time on campus was anything but normal.

On his first day of school, Gov. George Wallace ordered troops to stop him from registering. An FBI agent escorted him to the registrar, and he was assigned to one wing of a dormitory, where he lived alone until other Black students slowly began to enroll.

A semester later, he shared a bathroom with Willie Wyatt Jr. and Anthony Lee, the first Black students to enroll at Auburn as undergraduates. Wyatt and Lee applied in the fall of 1964, but were not initially accepted because they didn’t have housing, Wyatt told AL.com in a recent interview.

Lee attended all four years and became the school’s first Black graduate. Wyatt, like Franklin, left Auburn after a year and finished his degree at Tuskegee University.

“College life to me was not only supposed to be an academic experience but a social experience,” Wyatt said. “And at Auburn you would have no social experience.”

Franklin told the Washington Post years later that white students refused to sit next to him in his classes. He also struggled to gain support from his professors, he said.

Franklin wanted to write about the civil rights movement for his thesis, but revealed in a 2019 interview with AL.com that faculty urged him against it because the topic was “too controversial.”

He later changed his focus to the history of Alabama State College, his alma mater. But Auburn officials repeatedly rejected his submissions.

He submitted draft after draft, and faculty kept sending it back for trivial reasons, Franklin recalled. One professor, he said, said his work had to be perfect because he was Black and many people would read it.

“Finally I said, ‘Hell, what you’re telling me is I won’t get a degree from Auburn,’” Franklin told AL.com.

After leaving Auburn without graduating in 1965, Franklin received his master’s degree from the University of Denver. He later went on to pursue a long career teaching history at numerous colleges before his retirement in 1992.

In 2001, nearly 37 years after his enrollment, Auburn awarded Franklin an honorary Doctor of Arts, but the school never addressed the racism that prevented him from earning the degree he had actually applied for.

“It was a really nice gesture,” Keith Hébert, an associate professor of history at Auburn, told AL.com in 2021. “For Harold, the honorary degree was nice. He displays it. It’s on the wall. He’s Dr. Harold Franklin. But there was an incompleteness. He had earned all the credits, he did all the courses, he had written the thesis.”

Getting his degree

According to Hébert, officials did not learn about Franklin’s rejected master’s thesis until after his 2019 interview with AL.com, where Franklin discussed his experiences at the school and shared his thoughts on Gov. Kay Ivey’s blackface yearbook photo. Ivey was a freshman at the college when Franklin enrolled.

A couple of months later, Hébert and several other Auburn faculty went to visit Franklin at his home in Sylacauga, where they asked him if he still had his thesis. He reached across the sofa and let them read it. After 54 years, he always had it close by, he told them.

“We tried to evaluate it from the era it was written, which was 1969, to read what was approved that year,” Hébert, who would later chair Franklin’s thesis committee, told AL.com in 2021. “He had written a well-researched master’s thesis. He had, more than 50 years earlier, fulfilled all requirements. We organized a defense. It’s shameful that it had to take this long.”

Franklin successfully defended his master’s thesis on Feb. 19, 2020. Attached to the approval was a formal apology, Hébert said.

“I’m honored,” Franklin, then 87, told AL.com at the time. “I’m happy they finally decided after all these years. I’ll be there at graduation and get that degree.”

Because of the pandemic the graduation ceremony was postponed. Instead, Franklin received his diploma in the mail in June and attended commencement in August.

Franklin died just a year later on Sept. 9, 2021.

In 2008 the college opened the Harold A. Franklin Society to help support underrepresented male students. In 2015, officials unveiled a marker to commemorate Franklin’s achievements, stating that he simply left the university.

A new plaque was unveiled in 2021 at the recommendation of a task force.

“Dr. Franklin’s bold journey is the epitome of a spirit that is not afraid,” the plaque states. “His story continues to move our hearts, stimulate our minds and inspire our lives. The same spirit dwells within, reminding us that truth will always prevail.”

Auburn will host a commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Franklin’s enrollment at 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 9. A ceremony featuring several speakers will be held at the Mell Classroom Building, where Franklin first registered for classes.