Auburn University

rights era to present ===
Auburn University was racially segregated prior to 1963, with only white students being admitted. Integration began in 1964 with the admittance of the first African-American student, Harold A. Franklin. Franklin had to sue the university to gain admission to the graduate school and was denied a degree after he completed his master's thesis. He eventually was awarded his master's in history in 2020. The first degree granted to an African-American was in 1967. According to Auburn University's Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, African-Americans comprise 1,828 of the university's 24,864 undergraduates (7.35%) as of 2013 and 49 of the 1,192 full-time faculty (4.1%) as of 2012. Auburn has increased its "Black or African American" faculty percentage from 4.3% in 2003 to 4.7% in 2025, since the settlement of legal challenges to the underrepresentation of African Americans in AU's faculty in 2006.
In 2018, the university began a speaker series to promote racial diversity named …