With his hair now salt-and-pepper gray, Harold A. Franklin wore a red-striped tie over an elegant black suit with a handkerchief tucked in the lapel as he walked across the campus of Auburn University. This was the same campus he'd integrated more than 50 years ago, the same campus that assigned him a wing of a dormitory where he lived alone as the only Black student, and the same campus that denied him the chance to defend his master's thesis. "Each time, I would carry my thesis to be proof read, they'd find an excuse," said Franklin, now 86. "Sometimes, I didn't dot an 'i.' One of the professors told me: 'Yours has to be perfect because you are Black, and people will be reading yours.' " "I told him I had been to the thesis room and read the theses by White kids," Franklin recalled. "Theirs were not perfect. I couldn't understand why they couldn't accept mine." Franklin completed draft after draft. Each was rejected. Finally, he realized he was hitting a stonewall of racism. "I said, 'Hell, what you're telling me is I won't get a degree from Auburn?' " Then Franklin, a tall man who had grown up in the segregated South, told the thesis committee, "To hell with it." And he left. Years later, he would earn a master's in international relations from the University of Denver. He'd return to his home in Talladega, Ala., with his wife, Lilla Mae Sherman, and raise their son, Harold Franklin Jr. He'd teach history - at Alabama State University, North Carolina A&T State University, Tuskegee Institute and Talladega College - until his retirement in 1992. In 2001, Auburn University celebrated him as the first Black student and awarded him an honorary doctorate of arts. But Auburn never addressed the racism Franklin encountered trying to defend his thesis. Franklin...