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SYLACAUGA, Alabama – Harold Franklin never set out to attend Auburn University . The school with its agricultural heritage had little appeal for the bookish Franklin. “I used to hate when daddy grew a garden and I had to go out and help with it,” Franklin said. "That was the last place I wanted to go.” He had dreamed of being an attorney, inspired by his childhood idol Thurgood Marshall , the prominent counsel for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and first black Supreme Court justice . “I wanted to be a lawyer,” Franklin said, sitting on the couch in his two-bedroom apartment in Sylacauga below a framed photo of Samford Hall. “That was the most important thing to me.” Franklin graduated from Alabama State University , then named Alabama State College , in 1962 with a degree in government and psychology. Franklin was seeking character references for a law school application when an encounter with civil rights attorney Fred Gray put him on the track to b...

A racist flyer that made waves on social media today after a resident of an Irvine, Ca. apartment building found it hanging in an elevator is fraudulent, according to a spokesman for property company Equity Residential . “This flyer is a fake. It wasn’t produced by us. It wasn’t posted by us. I don’t know where it came from,” Equity representative Marty McKenna said over the phone this morning. The flyer—a notice about noise complaints in Irvine’s Toscana apartment complex—included a bolded section directed specifically at African-American residents. It read: We also would like to remind our African-American residents to keep conversation volume down and reduce music levels between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. Multiple complaints have been made regarding this issue. The notice attracted attention after Toscana Apartments tenant and Instagram user @teyent_theequeenb posted a photo and video to her page. “This is what it means to be black in Irvine,” she says in the video. “Blatant ra...

Regeni was undeterred. Proficient in five languages, he was insatiably curious and exuded a low-intensity charm that attracted a wide circle of friends. From 12 to 14, he served as youth mayor of his hometown, Fiumicello. He prided himself on his ability to navigate different cultures, and he relished Cairo ’s unruly street life : the smoky cafes, the endless hustle, the candy- colored party boats that plied the Nile at night. He registered as a visiting scholar at American University in Cairo and found a room in Dokki, a traffic-choked neighborhood between the Pyramids and the Nile, where he shared an apartment with two young professionals : Juliane Schoki, who taught German, and Mohamed El Sayad , a lawyer at one of Cairo’s oldest law firms . Dokki was an unfashionable address, but it was just two subway stops from downtown Cairo with its maze of cheap hotels, dive bars and crumbling apartment blocks encircling Tahrir Square . Regeni soon befriended writers and artists and practi...