A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Jr. was born on the twenty-fifth of February 1928 at Trenton, New Jersey, the only child of Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Sr. — a labourer at the Hutchinson Foundry of Trenton — and Emma Lee Higginbotham, a domestic worker who held the eighth-grade certificate and who across her life would describe to her son the books and the lecture-room she had been forbidden to enter. The father insisted on his son's secondary education at the segregated Trenton Central High School, where the young Higginbotham completed the curriculum in three years. He took the bachelor's at Antioch College in Ohio in 1949 — Antioch had been one of the few non-Black colleges that admitted Black undergraduates without quota in the 1940s — and the LL.B. at Yale Law School in 1952.

He was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1952 and joined the new Philadelphia civil-rights and labour-law firm of Norris Schmidt Green Harris and Higginbotham. He was elected at twenty-five Assistant District Attorney for the City of Philadelphia in 1953 and elected to the Pennsylvania State Commissioner of the Commonwealth on Human Relations in 1962.

President John Kennedy appointed him in 1962 a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission — the youngest commissioner of any federal regulatory body to that date. President Lyndon Johnson appointed him in 1964 to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania — at thirty-six the youngest federal judge in the United States at that date. President Jimmy Carter elevated him in 1977 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where he served for the following sixteen years, including as Chief Judge from 1989 to 1993.

His decisive scholarly contribution was the two-volume study of the constitutional law of race — In the Matter of Color (1978), tracing the colonial-period statutes from Virginia to Massachusetts to Pennsylvania to Connecticut to South Carolina, and Shades of Freedom (1996), tracing the nineteenth-and-twentieth-century constitutional doctrine. The two volumes remain the foundational documentary historiography of the constitutional law of American race.

He retired from the bench in 1993 and accepted the public service professorship of jurisprudence at Harvard, holding the post until his death. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1995.

He died at Boston on the fourteenth of December 1998, at seventy.

He is honored here as the historian of the constitutional law of race.