Her sophomore year, Gloria’s first Auburn roommate, a white student, moved out before she ever moved in.

“I had unpacked, and the roommate came in, she and her mom, and we spoke,” she said. “They were going downstairs to get other stuff, but they came back with the house mother and they told me they made a mistake.

“So initially I had the room alone, and then another black student was assigned to that dorm and we became roommates. There were some students who had already participated in integration and that was not an issue for them, so for those students it was fine.



“We had been accepting all of our lives of the white culture and white people. Now it was reversed because now we are becoming a part of the whole culture, and so that acceptance had to come from white students, our professors and administrators.

“Integration was inevitable, but still not wanted. People are reluctant to change.”

By the time Gloria enrolled, James had already played two seasons of Auburn football. An NCAA rule prevented freshmen from playing varsity football or men’s basketball, so Owens played for Auburn’s freshman team in 1969. As a sophomore in 1970, he played defense and returned punts, including an 89-yarder for his first Auburn touchdown at Florida on Halloween.

One year before James arrived from Fairfield High School near Birmingham, Henry Harris became Auburn’s first African-American student-athlete, playing for the freshman basketball team in 1968.

“That was a beautiful relationship because Henry could share some of his experiences with James,” Gloria said. “Henry was the leaning post for James, and then those athletes that came after James, he was like the daddy. They called him ‘Daddy O’. A lot of his friends still refer to him as ‘Daddy O’ because of the impact.”

That impact came with a price, both physical and mental.

“He did talk about the extra licks, the extra elbows, the extra punches he got on the field,” Gloria said. “The taunting that he had to endure. Having the coaches have to call some higher-up in the state of Alabama for him to be able to stay in a hotel because it wasn’t permitted in some of the other states he had to go into.

“It was hard. He could laugh and joke with his teammates and mask that hurt.”