Higginbotham, A. Leon (Aloyisus Leon), 1928-1998

Aloysius Leon Higginbotham, Jr. (1928-1998) was born in Trenton, New Jersey, to Aloysius Higginbotham, a factory worker, and Emma Lee Douglass Higginbotham, a maid. Young Higginbotham attended Ewing Park, a black segregated public elementary school, and integrated an all-white high school. As an adolescent, he worked as a hotel busboy, shoe store porter, and laborer. He excelled in school, demonstrating great skill in logic and language. A serious student, one summer he regularly rode his bicycle nearly 20 miles to be tutored. At age 16 Higginbotham left home to begin his undergraduate studies at Purdue University. Initially, he showed interest in becoming an engineer, but an incident involving unfair housing for black students changed his mind and his life forever. Higginbotham requested heated accommodation in a campus dormitory for black students who were residing in the attic of an old house. Purdue''s president, Edward Charles Elliot, replied as quoted in the American Bar Association Journal for September 1996, "Higginbotham, the law doesn''t require us to let colored students in the dorm. We will never do it. And you either accept things as they are or leave the university immediately." Higginbotham said in the same source, "I am a lawyer today because of Dr. Elliott''s negative motivation. I felt that I could not go into engineering, that I had to challenge the system." Higginbotham transferred to Antioch College in Ohio where he met, and on August 21, 1948, married his first wife Jeanne L. Foster. Prior to receipt of his B.A. in sociology from Antioch College in 1949, Higginbotham successfully applied to Yale University School of Law. After graduating with an LL.B. in 1952, he served as a law clerk in the office of Justice William Curtis Bok in Philadelphia until 1953, when he was admitted to the Bar of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. During this time, Higginbotham''s commitment to ending racism grew in response to witnessing Thurgood Marshall argue the Sweatt v. Painter case. This case contested the University of Texas School of Law''s denial of admission to blacks. Higginbotham served briefly as an assistant district attorney for Philadelphia County and in 1954 became a partner in the law firm Norris, Green, Harris, and (later) Higginbotham. He remained there until 1962 while simultaneously holding posts as a special hearing officer for the U.S. Department of Justice. In 1963, Higginbotham became the youngest commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson appointed Higginbotham to serve as a U.S. District Court judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia. Several of his law clerks later became influential figures in national politics. These clerks included Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton; Edward Dennis, head of the Criminal Division of the U. S. Department of Justice; Gilbert Casellas, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; and Kathleen Cleaver, former Black Panther who became an attorney and professor at Harvard University. For 13 years Higginbotham served as a jurist and lectured at university law schools nationwide. Serving as a visiting professor, he held posts at Wharton Graduate School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, the University of Hawaii in 1973 and 1974, and Yale University in 1975.