HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Higginbotham Dead at 70

Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., chief judge emeritus of the U.S. Third-Circuit Court of Appeals and public service professor of jurisprudence at the Kennedy School of Government, died on Monday evening, Dec. 14, at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 70.

Throughout his life - on the bench, in the classroom, and in numerous books, articles, and public talks - Higginbotham defended civil rights with great passion and eloquence. He repeatedly urged the nation to confront the racial violence and injustice of a past it preferred to forget, often highlighting the case with revelations from his own painstaking studies of seemingly ordinary historical documents.

"In losing Leon Higginbotham, we have lost a giant oak, and we are left with an enormous gap in the landscape of the nation," said President Neil L. Rudenstine. "He was a powerful presence and voice, a voice that has influenced our legal and judicial world for decades.

"Judge Higginbotham always championed the cause of equity and fairness. But he did so without ever diminishing the strength of his conviction that the nation still has a very great distance to travel before African Americans will have gained genuine equality of opportunity. The force of his intellect was extraordinary, his passion for justice profound, and his moral authority immense."

Kennedy School Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. recalled Higginbotham as "a towering figure in American law and public policy who had a wonderful influence on his students at the Kennedy School of Government. We shall miss him greatly."

Law School Dean Robert C. Clark hailed him as "a brilliant jurist and dedicated teacher who did much to educate students about race and law in the United States, not only through his classroom discussions and legal publications but also by the personal example of his lifelong commitment to the elimination of racial discrimination."

Charles Ogletree, the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, observed that Higginbotham was "not only a mentor but a father figure for me and for a generation of young law professors and lawyers. He was the epitome of the people's lawyer. Despite his individual merits and accomplishments, he never hesitated to lend a hand to the poor, the voiceless, the powerless, and the downtrodden."

Born on Feb. 25, 1928, in Trenton, N.J., Higginbotham studied engineering at Purdue University before switching to liberal arts at Antioch College, where he received his B.A. (1949). After earning an LL.B. (1952) at Yale Law School, he worked in Philadelphia for two years as an assistant district attorney and then joined a local law firm. By 1956, he had become special deputy attorney general for Pennsylvania.

Six years later, President John F. Kennedy named him to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), thereby making him the FTC's first black commissioner and its youngest as well. In 1964, he became judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Higginbotham again broke new ground in 1969, when he became Yale's first black trustee. That same year he headed for the Virgin Islands to serve as U.S. District Court judge.

By appointment of President Jimmy Carter, Higginbotham became judge of the U.S. Third-Circuit Court of Appeals in October 1977. He retired from the federal bench in March 1993.

Over the years, U.S. Chief Justices Earl Warren, Warren Earl Burger, and William Rehnquist appointed Higginbotham to various Judicial Conference committees and related responsibilities. He also served as counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus for several voting-rights cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court.

At the request of South African leader Nelson Mandela, Higginbotham became an international mediator for issues surrounding the 1994 national elections, in which all South Africans could participate for the first time.

In addition to teaching at Harvard (where he was the 1984 W.E.B. Du Bois Lecturer), Higginbotham shared his legal insights with students at the law schools of the University of Michigan, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale.

His many awards included the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995), the Spirit of Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award (1994), and the Roger Baldwin Award of the American Civil Liberties Union (1998).

As an author, Higginbotham is best known for a widely acclaimed multivolume series on Race and the American Legal Process. The first installment, In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period (Oxford University Press, 1978), contains the "first examination of the legal precedents for distinguishing black people from others in Colonial America," according to Nathan I. Huggins, Harvard's (late) Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies.

Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process, the second volume, appeared in 1996. Recently, he had been working on the third and fourth volumes, and had also started his autobiography.

Higginbotham also wrote Race, Values, and the Early American Legal Process (Lagos University Press, 1987) and coedited (with John Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil) African Americans and the Living Constitution (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).

He leaves his wife, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (a professor of history and of Afro-American studies at Harvard); two daughters, Karen and Nia; and two sons, Stephen and Kenneth.

The body will lie in state at People's Baptist Church, 134 Camden St., Boston, on Sunday, Dec. 20, 6 to 8 p.m. Funeral services will be held at People's Baptist Church at noon on Monday, Dec. 21. The burial will be in Oak Bluffs Cemetery, Martha's Vineyard, on Tuesday, Dec. 22, at 1 p.m.

A memorial service at the University is being planned for early next year.

In lieu of flowers, contributions in Higginbotham's name may be made to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc., 99 Hudson St., 16th Floor, New York, NY 10013; and the Children's Defense Fund, 25 E St., N.W., Washington, DC 20001.