 As a high school student in 1963, Gaillard witnessed the arrest of Martin Luther King in Birmingham, Alabama, during King's Birmingham campaign against racial segregation.While at Vanderbilt he came into contact with Stokley Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver, when the two Black Panthers were engaged to speak.Shortly after, in 1968, he invited Robert F. Kennedy to speak at Vanderbilt, 11 weeks prior to Kennedy's assassination.