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Content provided by the American Bar Association Division for Public Education. Visit the Division for Public Education's website to learn more about the law and its role in society (www.abanet.org/publiced). For more profiles of pioneers in the legal profession, visit the Division for Public Education's Raising the Bar: Pioneers in the Legal Profession website at www.abanet.org/publiced/raisingthebar.html.
Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.
(1928-1998)
(1928-1998)
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A jurist, a legal scholar, a civil rights activist, and a professor, Judge Leon Higginbotham remained an outspoken advocate for the voiceless throughout his life. Aloysius Leon Higginbotham, Jr. was born on February 25, 1928, in segregated Trenton, New Jersey. The son of a cleaning lady and a laborer, Higginbotham grew up in a home that only had two books, a dictionary and the Bible. In 1944, Higginbotham was determined to study engineering, even though admission was closed to African Americans at most universities. He was able to enroll at Purdue University in Indiana, but soon learned that African American students were not allowed to stay in the dormitories. He slept in an unheated attic room at the campus's International House where snow would come through the rafters. After a year at Purdue, he suggested to the president of the university that blacks should be allowed to stay in the dormitory and was told, "Higginbotham, you take it or leave it. The law doesn't require us to have blacks in the dormitory." Soon afterwards, another incident would become a catalyst for his decision to leave Purdue. As he traveled with his debate team to Northwestern University in Chicago, the college sophomore would find himself face to face with discrimination once again. "I was fortunate enough to make the Big Ten Debate," Higginbotham recalled in a 1976 interview. "When we went into the hotel to register, all of my classmates registered and when it was time for me to sign up the manager came over rather abruptly and said, 'Look, he can't stay here.'" Higginbotham then recalled that the coach, who had always told the team to speak with conviction, suddenly became mild mannered and said, "Well, where is the closest colored YMCA?" As a result, Higginbotham stayed "in a rat-infested colored YMCA" while his teammates slept at the hotel. He soon resolved to leave Purdue and to switch to law so that he could work for social change. Higginbotham transferred to Antioch College, where he met another new student, Coretta Scott who would later marry Martin Luther King, Jr. After receiving his B.A. from Antioch in 1949, he went to Yale Law School, earning an LL.B. in 1952. He worked in Philadelphia for two years as an assistant district attorney and then joined a local law firm. He also served as president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.) By 1956, he had become special deputy attorney general for Pennsylvania. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy named Higginbotham to head the Federal Trade Commission, making him the FTC's first black commissioner and its youngest as well. In 1964, he was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to serve on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, the youngest African American to serve as a federal judge. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed Higginbotham to serve on the U.S. Third-Circuit Court of Appeals, where he would become chief judge of the court in 1989. After serving as a federal judge for 29 years, Higginbotham retired in 1993 and soon became an outspoken critic of conservative social policies and the U.S. Supreme Court justices that supported them. He devoted himself to working on four social issues: racial and gender equality, religious tolerance, the eradication of poverty, and the protection of children. 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. In 1969, as Yale's first black trustee, Higginbotham encouraged the school to admit female students for the first time. After retiring from the court in 1993 he served as counsel to the Congressional Black Caucus for several voting-rights cases heard before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1994, at the request of South African leader Nelson Mandela, Higginbotham became an international mediator for issues surrounding the first national elections in which all South Africans could participate. His many awards included the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995), the NAACP's Spingarn Medal (1996), and the Roger Baldwin Award of the American Civil Liberties Union (1998). In addition to teaching at Harvard, where his wife was a professor of history and Afro-American studies, Higginbotham taught at the law schools of the University of Michigan, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford, and Yale. With his six foot, five inch frame and a booming baritone voice, he was well known for his passionate teaching and much loved by his students. "He was not only a mentor but a father figure for me and for a generation of young law professors and lawyers," explained Charles Ogletree, a member of the Harvard Law School faculty who studied under Higginbotham. "He was the epitome of the peoples' lawyer. Despite his individual merits and accomplishments, he never hesitated to lend a hand to the poor, the voiceless, the powerless. and the downtrodden." As an author, Higginbotham is best known for a widely acclaimed multi-volume series on race and the American legal process, including In the Matter of Color: The Colonial Period (1978) and Shades of Freedom: Racial Politics and Presumptions of the American Legal Process (1996.) Higginbotham was working on the third and fourth volumes of his series when he died on December 14, 1998. Just one month earlier, he had traveled to Washington, D.C. to urge the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee not to impeach President William Clinton. "There are grave systemic dangers in resorting to impeachment except in the most extreme cases," he testified, adding that President Clinton's alleged perjury regarding consensual sexual relations "does not rise to the level of 'Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors' about which the framers were concerned when they drafted Article II of the U.S. Constitution." At various memorial services, held in Boston, New York, D.C., and Philadelphia, political leaders and scholars praised his lifelong devotion to the cause of civil rights. "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 Neil L. Rudenstine, Harvard University president. Harvard 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, not only through his classroom discussions and legal publications but also by personal example." But one of the most moving tributes came from a former law clerk who went on to become Philadelphia's City Solicitor. Stephanie L. Franklin-Suber recalled that she was a 24-year-old third-year law student when she suffered a stroke in December, 1981, two months after her mother died. "I was in intensive care with an oxygen tent over me," she said at the memorial service in Philadelphia. "Someone brought a telephone to my bed. It was Judge Higginbotham calling. To me, it was God calling. Judge Higginbotham offered me encouragement and inspiration. That call was the turning point of my life." According to Higginbotham's widow, Evelyn, "the one thing [in the memorial service] that really captured my husband's compassion was what Stephanie Franklin-Suber said. He reached out to her when she was down. She got well and she went on to become a strong lawyer. That was typical of his life." Sources: Higginbotham, F. Michael. "Saving the Dream for All: A Tribute to A. Leon Higginbotham," Human Rights, Summer 1999, American Bar Association. Transcript, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. Oral History, Interview I, 10/7/76 by Joe B. Frantz, LBJ Library, Internet Copy at www.lbjlib.utexas.edu www.law.harvard.edu Africana website, www.africana.com (Originally published in 2001) |
