Fifty years have passed since Minnesota singer-songwriter Bob Dylan released “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” a song that became the rallying cry for social unrest throughout the turbulent 1960s. The song was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, hitting the airwaves the same year a married Air Force veteran named Harold Franklin arrived on a cold January morning to register for graduate school classes.

What made Jan. 4, 1964, different from any other registration day was that Harold Franklin was Black, and Auburn University wasn’t.

Like the Civil Rights Movement itself, the story of Auburn’s integration began long before, with an escalation of litigation, a violent social landscape, a divided nation and a governor deeply at odds with one of his state’s key university presidents.

It’s hard in these times to imagine the undercurrent of fear and anger that accompanied life in the South in the early 1960s. As early as 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that state-sponsored segregation of public schools violated the U.S. Constitution, Auburn University President Ralph B. Draughon had been closely following developments. A historian with an interest in public affairs, Draughon kept tabs on civil rights cases as they played out in courtrooms around the South, and began advocating, unsuccessfully, for Alabama to increase its funding to minority institutions.

But by the early 1960s, increasingly violent civil rights clashes had reached the Southern university. January 1961 had seen a week of protest as the first two Black students entered the University of Georgia, and in fall 1962, James Meredith became the first Black student to enroll at Ole Miss, setting off riots that required a takeover by U.S. Marshals and federal troops. Two people died and more than 200 were injured.

The incident at Ole Miss prompted Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace to promise to thwart any attempts at desegregation at the University of Alabama, where one attempt to integrate, back in the 1950s, had proven unsuccessful.

His infamous “schoolhouse door” stand at the University of Alabama took place on June 11, 1963, when Vivian Malone and James Hood arrived in Tuscaloosa. Heavy media coverage sent dramatic images around the world, resulting in negative publicity for both the state and the university.

Draughon was determined that such a thing would not happen at Auburn, but he’d already had several heated clashes with Wallace over the issue.

Not long after Wallace’s theatrics in Tuscaloosa, Draughon received a telegram from President John F. Kennedy. “Right after the attorney general (Robert F. Kennedy) faced down Wallace about admitting the Black students at the University of Alabama, President Kennedy sent my father a telegram,” said Ralph B. Draughon Jr. ’58. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come to the White House and let’s talk about the problems of civil rights and education in the South?’ and my father went, but he couldn’t tell George Wallace.”

Another source of tension: Draughon’s desire to have Auburn integrate quietly and voluntarily, without involving the courts. “Of course, nobody could know this, but [my father] had proposed to the board of trustees that the university find a really bright African American student and admit him or her, and do it as simply as possible,” Draughon Jr. said. “He convinced the board to go along with it, but George Wallace had a fit about it and wouldn’t permit it. He was very angry at my father about that.”

Auburn faculty and students weren’t immune to what was going on, either, and in her master’s thesis on the university’s integration and, in particular, Draughon’s handling of media coverage, L. Anne Willis ’05 outlines an ongoing series of disagreements between the staff of The Auburn Plainsman and the administration. Strongly worded editorials and articles by both students and faculty advocating integration in 1961 and 1962 resulted in suspension of publication during the summer of 1962 and the creation of new policy guidelines on the newspaper’s role and responsibility.

As 1963 progressed, Draughon was trapped in what seemed like a no-win situation, and his son remembers the toll it took. “My father was caught between an irresistible force, the federal government, and in immovable object, George Wallace and the state legislature,” Draughon Jr. said.

“A lot of liberals thought he was doing too little and George Wallace thought he was doing too much, but he did do a lot behind the scenes. It was very stressful, and I’m sure it shortened his life. I think he deserves a lot of credit ultimately for the peaceful integration of Auburn.”

While Draughon worked behind the scenes, another drama unfolded in Montgomery involving a 30-year-old Air Force veteran named Harold Franklin. In 1962 he had graduated with honors from Alabama State College. Married, with a child on the way, Franklin dreamed of going to law school and becoming the next Thurgood Marshall. He’d set his sights on law school at the University of Alabama, but civil rights attorney Fred Gray convinced him to instead pursue graduate school at the still-segregated Auburn.

“I reluctantly agreed,” Franklin recalls. “At the time Auburn had a heavy emphasis on agriculture, not liberal arts, but I sent Auburn my application. When they realized I graduated from Alabama State, they turned me down, not because I was Black, they said, but because Alabama State was not accredited.”

In August 1962, Gray filed a class action suit on Franklin’s behalf, offering testimony from the state education superintendent that Alabama State’s lack of accreditation was due to inadequate state funding. It sealed a victory for Franklin’s case, and Auburn was ordered to admit him the next spring.

Jamie Hardin Freeman ’65 was working as secretary to admissions director E.J. Brumfield at the time. “I opened the envelope that had Mr. Franklin’s application for admission,” she recalls. “The admissions committee at the time had informed me as to what I should do when we received the first African American application. I was to say nothing to anyone and give the application to Mr. Brumfield. He, in turn, carried the application to President Draughon for the proper channels to be activated for review and consideration for the admission of Mr. Franklin.

“To my knowledge, it was a well-kept secret because most staff members, faculty and students did not know about his entrance until he was on campus. At the moment it seemed to be a significant event, but never did I think it would become a major historical one.”

With the court ruling, Draughon’s planning went into high gear. According to Willis’ research, the Auburn president wanted to both accommodate the media coverage of Franklin’s registration and to control it. He limited access to a single mobile camera unit, decreed that only full-time employees of news organizations could be present, and set up a media-pool area just off campus.

SGA President Jim Vickrey ’64 remembers the student senate also getting involved to ensure things went smoothly, working with administrators to set up emergency rules of conduct to take effect when students returned from winter break.

“I remember those of us in leadership were called together by President Draughon and other officials,” said Vickrey, now a resident of Montgomery. “We had a number of meetings about the details of planning for integration, and the reason that was so important wasn’t really because we expected Auburn’s campus to go bonkers over it, but because Governor Wallace had stood in the schoolhouse door at Alabama and created all that ruckus. We didn’t know what he was going to do, and he wouldn’t tell anybody.”

“We felt honored to have been at Auburn at that moment in history. We were concerned about potential mischief – not really violence or arson, but mischief. And we were concerned about Auburn being embarrassed. We wanted Auburn to look good.”

The Plainsman staff also did some preparatory work. “The senior staff had some informal meetings with the leaders of Tuskegee Institute,” said George Gardner ’65, news editor of the paper and now living in Maryland. “These meetings had to be kept secret, and we did them over in Tuskegee on Sundays because we were kind of afraid to bring them to our campus. That was the mood.”

Among the Plainsman staff, Gardner said, there was support for Franklin’s arrival. “It was the right thing to do.” he said. “It was just crazy that it hadn’t happened yet, and we were determined it wouldn’t happen with the sort of fiasco that the University of Alabama had. We were determined that at Auburn it would happen with grace and dignity.”

On Tuesday, Dec. 3, 1963, Draughon called a meeting of the student body at the stadium, attended by 90 percent of Auburn’s students. “There must have been 10,000 students there,” Vickrey said. “The president and other officials said, in effect, ‘Live out the Auburn Creed. Be Auburn men and women, regardless of the way you feel about the court order or integration. Auburn will follow the law, and you’re expected to follow the law. If you don’t, you can expect to be invited out of town and dismissed from the university.’”

“I remember that vividly, that and the letter that went out to parents echoing the same thing,” said Gardner. “Not because of their impact but because of how simply true to Auburn they were.”

Saturday, Jan. 4, 1964, dawned cold and rainy. By 6 a.m., “Restricted” signs ringed campus. At 8 a.m., “News Central” opened in a hotel banquet room a block from the university.

Draughon held a last-minute meeting with the board. “They met and agreed about how things should work,” Draughon Jr. said. “They had gone to see George Wallace in Montgomery, and he agreed to the plan. Among the things to which the governor had agreed was that federal troops would be allowed to enter the Auburn campus and escort Harold Franklin to register.”

Among the students, most of whom heeded the administration’s request to stay away, things were tense. “It was an explosive situation,” Vickrey said. “We didn’t know what might happen, and we didn’t know what the governor was going to do. We were planning a two-pronged strategy: what we would do if he did something, and what we would do if he did nothing.”

Wallace didn’t come to Auburn, but he did make a move. “At the last minute George Wallace double-crossed [my father],” Draughon Jr. said. “Al Lingo, the head of the state police and sort of George Wallace’s official troublemaker, wouldn’t let the federal officials on campus to protect Harold Franklin. So that morning, my father fired off a letter to George Wallace and said, essentially, that he had double-crossed him and that if there was any trouble at Auburn, it would not be the responsibility of the Auburn University Board of Trustees or the administration or the students. It would be George Wallace’s responsibility.”

“Wallace wrote back a very hot letter and said that he was disgusted with my father. He was still angry that my father had initially suggested they admit a qualified Black student voluntarily, and he sort of threatened that Auburn’s appropriations would be affected.”

Harold Franklin would be without protection.

In the meantime, Franklin, being driven from Montgomery to Auburn by a friend, had been waylaid by a flat tire. He flagged down Fred Gray, who knew from the morning papers that Lingo had promised to arrest any federal troops trying to enter Auburn’s campus. Instead of taking Franklin to the university, Gray drove him to the Auburn United Methodist Church, whose minister had offered Franklin assistance.

Fearing Lingo’s men would try to plant a gun in Franklin’s bags as had been done to James Meredith at Ole Miss, the Methodist minister arranged for FBI officers to inspect Franklin’s bags so they could bear witness that he had no weapons. “When I got out of the car, a guy reached in his pocket and pulled out his FBI badge,” Franklin recalled in a speech given on the 35th anniversary of his enrollment at Auburn. 

Auburn’s development director Joe Sarver picked Franklin up at the church and ferried him to Magnolia Dormitory, where Franklin would be living. “When I got there, not only did they have a room for me, they gave me a whole wing to myself, three stories tall,” Franklin said. “So, I put my things in and went to register.”

As he left the dorm, he was met by Dean of Student Affairs James Foy and his assistant, who planned to walk with Franklin to the library for registration.

They didn’t get far. “Al Lingo stopped us. He said the court ordered me to be treated the same as other students. White students weren’t escorted to registration, so I had to go alone,” Franklin said. “I knew then, they were going to kill me. They were setting me up to kill me.”

His conviction increased when, on his way to the library, he was stopped by a state trooper who demanded to see his student identification – which, of course he didn’t have because he hadn’t yet registered. Before the situation could escalate, however, another officer joined them, looked at Franklin’s driver’s license, and sent him on his way to the library. He walked away alone in the cold drizzle.

In the end, Franklin’s registration went off peacefully. “The city police and campus officials were too mad at Al Lingo to bother paying much attention to me,” Franklin said. “They just wanted their town back.”

A couple hundred students stood across the street and watched. A few shouted insults, but most remained quiet, and the crowd dispersed when Franklin entered the library. As he came back out, two students – Jim Dinsmore ’64 and Bobby Boettcher ’64 – shook his hand and welcomed him to Auburn.

“That was on a Saturday,” Franklin said. “I went to my dormitory and sat there until Monday morning.” Five days later, the state highway officers left Auburn. Seventeen days later, Franklin’s son was born in Montgomery.

Franklin said he made some friends at Auburn and, mostly, people left him alone. “My classes went okay. I got in a couple of classes where, when the white students saw I was there, they withdrew from the class, but that didn’t bother me,” he said. “And I did have those 60 rooms in Magnolia all to myself. I counted them.”

Ultimately, Franklin left Auburn without his graduate degree when his thesis wasn’t accepted by his advisors. “I wanted to write something on the civil rights struggle, but the professors at Auburn told me that was too controversial. They wanted me to write on the history of Alabama State College. Each time I would turn it in, they found something wrong with it.” So he left, first teaching at Alabama State, then joining the faculty at Tuskegee. Eventually, he received a scholarship to the University of Denver, where he finished his degree and enjoyed a teaching appointment at Talladega until his retirement in 1992.

Auburn University conferred an honorary degree on Franklin in 2001.

With Franklin gone, it fell to Samuel Pettijohn ’67 to hold the distinction as the first African American student to earn an Auburn degree. Pettijohn, now a school principal in Maryland, started his college career at Tuskegee but found it didn’t meet his academic needs. “I was in an experimental physics program at Tuskegee,” he said. “Experimental means they were just starting it my sophomore year, and when I went back for my junior year there were no courses for me to take.”

One of his professors talked him into driving to Auburn to finish his studies. “Auburn had been integrated about a year and a half at the time,” Pettijohn said. “There were seven other African American students there, but the first semester I was really not aware of them.” Eventually, the students met and were able to offer each other support.

Much like Franklin, Pettijohn found himself isolated. “It was the typical type of things that were going on at that time, things now that just seem perfectly and obviously silly. Students would get up and move because you sat down at a table, or people that you were in class with would not speak to you. Other than that, though, we had a little tight-knit group and we went about things as best as could be expected.”

The number of Black students might have risen, but when Thom Gossom ’74 entered Auburn as a walk-on football player in 1970, integration in college athletics was still in its infancy.

Gossom, the second African American player to join Coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan’s football team, had attended, at his mother’s insistence, the predominantly white John Carroll Catholic High School in Birmingham alongside another Auburn player named Pat Sullivan. “I didn’t want to go [to John Carroll] because I had to take two buses to get there and nobody from my neighborhood went there,” he said. “What I ended up becoming was an ambassador to two different worlds – the world I lived in and the world I went to school in, and their boundaries never touched.”

Recognizing that dichotomy early on helped some when he got to Auburn. “It was like going backward in time in some ways,” said Gossom, who went on to become a successful actor and author. “There was very little interaction with other students, so it took a lot of getting used to. Being an athlete made it different in a lot of ways, better in a lot of ways, because you have this thing that you’re trying to accomplish as a team, so you become closer to each other. But there were a lot of things that needed to happen that hadn’t happened over the years.

James Owens, who broke the color barrier with Auburn football, and basketball player Henry Harris, Auburn’s first Black scholarship athlete, formed a great support system for Gossom. “They were my big brothers,” he said. “We made a great little team and looked out for each other. When Henry left, James was the oldest. When James left, I was the elder and by then we had 14 Black athletes in the dorm. They became part of my responsibility.”

It wasn’t always a responsibility he wanted, but Gossom recognized his need to be a leader. “Auburn had only been officially integrated for six years, and that was just a handful of people and most of them didn’t stay. It was challenging, but you accept the responsibilities of where you’ve been placed. Ghandi said, ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world.’ So if you want things to change you have to be a part of the process.” Gossom pauses. “So we became a part of the process.”

In 1975, Gossom became the university’s first Black athlete to graduate. His 2008 memoir, “Walk On,” recounts his time at Auburn.

Fifty years after he made the long, lonely walk across campus to register at Auburn, Harold Franklin doesn’t see himself as a pioneer. “I’m just glad I could do something during the civil rights struggle to help make things better,” he said from his home in Sylacauga, where, although retired from teaching, he still works at an area funeral home.

“I think I helped some people. I hope I did, anyways,” he said. “I think people began to learn that I was just as human as anyone. I bled the same blood that anybody else did, and I would cry if you made me too angry, and I would argue with you until hell froze over if I was right. If I wasn’t right, I would gladly apologize.”

For Vickrey, being at Auburn in 1964 changed his life and his perspective. “Auburn not only desegregated in 1964, but my personal experiences and growth separated me from my past and gave me the outlook I have today on racial matters. I have to thank Auburn for helping me gain perspective because I certainly didn’t go to college with it.”

Gossom, recently named vice-chair of the Auburn University Foundation, has made a number of trips back to Auburn in recent years. He likes what he sees. “I love the international focus at the university and that our students are going all over the world and that we’re getting students from all over the world,” he said. “I like that the university is becoming more diversified. It really is exciting.

“Auburn just has something. Even back in 1970, when I walked on that campus, there was something that said, ‘Yeah, this is where I want to be.’ Even then, there was something special about this place, this village, this feeling, this family, whatever you choose to call it. It’s wonderful to be a part of it.”