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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...