Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Jr. (February 25, 1928 – December 14, 1998) was an American civil rights advocate, historian, presidential adviser, and federal court judge. From 1990 to 1991, he served as chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Originally nominated to the bench by President Kennedy in 1963, Higginbotham was the seventh African-American Article III judge appointed in the United States, and the first African-American United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. He was elevated to the Third Circuit in 1977, serving as a federal judge for nearly 30 years in all. In 1995, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Higginbotham used the name "Leon" informally.
Higginbotham was born on February 25, 1928, in Ewing Township, a suburb of Trenton, New Jersey. His mother, Emma Lee Higginbotham, was a maid, and his father, Aloyisus Leon Higginbotham Sr., was a factory worker. Higginbotham was raised in a largely African-American neighborhood, and attended a segregated grammar school.
Higginbotham attended Lincoln School, a segregated high school in Trenton. Before Higginbotham attended, no black student had been put on the academic track (which was a significant step towards attending college), because Latin, a requirement for the program, was not taught at the black elementary schools. Higginbotham's mother convinced the principal at the junior high school to enroll him in a second-year Latin course, even though he had never studied first year Latin. To ensure that he was able to pass the required classes, the junior high Latin teacher offered to tutor him at her home during the summer. Higginbotham's family was of modest economic means, so he worked while attending school, mowing lawns, shoveling snow, and working as a bus boy at the Stacy Trent hotel. While in high school, Higginbotham manipulated his birth certificate in order to get working papers at 15, a year before the law allowed, so that he could work in a pottery factory shoveling clay.
At 16 Higginbotham enrolled in Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. He chose Purdue because it admitted black students; was cheaper, at that time, than Rutgers University; and offered tuition discounts for good academic performance. Higginbotham was also interested in Purdue because he wanted to be an engineer, and Purdue was known as an engineering school.
Higginbotham entered Purdue as a freshman in 1944. At the time, the student body was composed of approximately 6,000 white students, and 12 black students. Although eligible for admission, black students were not permitted to live in the dormitories. Higginbotham and the other 11 black students were placed in a building called International House, which was the only building in which blacks could live in West Lafayette. The students slept in the attic, which was unheated. Higginbotham sought a meeting with the University President, Edward C. Elliott, to ask permission for the students to sleep in a section of one of the heated dormitories. Elliott's response was purportedly "[t]he law doesn't require us to put you in those dormitories. The law doesn't even require us to let you in. You take it or leave it." Higginbotham would later identify this encounter, and an incident where he was traveling with the Purdue debate team but unable to stay in a hotel with the rest of the members, as the events that caused him to pursue a career in the law, saying:
And then, even though I had been doing very well there, I decided that engineering would not make any difference in America. The most which a black person could do as an engineer is to make a better gadget, but a gadget which would not significantly do anything with the oppression. So I guess on that trip back to the segregated house, International House, I decided that I wanted to go into law and to challenge the system.
Higginbotham transferred to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1945. On the day that Higginbotham entered Antioch, one other black student was also admitted, Coretta Scott, who would later become Coretta Scott King after marrying Martin Luther King Jr. At Antioch, Higginbotham served as the head of the college chapter of the NAACP. While in college, Higginbotham successfully convinced the Governor of Ohio to support legislation to lower the voting age to 18. Higginbotham earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1949.
In the fall of 1949 Higginbotham entered Yale Law School. As he had in grade school, he worked, this time as a butcher, to help support himself while at Yale. He was a member of the moot court team and the Barrister's Union (a mock trial organization). Higginbotham advanced to the finals of the first year moot court competition. The moot court panel before which he argued included Associate Justice Tom C. Clark (of the Supreme Court of the United States) and renowned appellate advocate John W. Davis. (A few years later, Davis would argue against Thurgood Marshall on behalf of the State of Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education.) In 1951, Higginbotham competed on a moot court team with Richard N. Gardner, who would later serve as United States Ambassador to Spain and the United States Ambassador to Italy. Higginbotham's Yale team competed against a team from Temple University Law School, which included another African American law student from the Philadelphia area, Clifford Scott Green, who would later become Higginbotham's colleague (first as a law partner and then as a fellow Judge on the Eastern District of Pennsylvania bench).
As a first-year student, Higginbotham worked as a research assistant to a professor, who arranged for him to attend the oral arguments in Sweatt v. Painter, which dealt with the admission of blacks to the University of Texas. Thurgood Marshall argued the case on behalf of Herman Sweatt, who had been denied admission to the university's law school. Higginbotham would later describe the experience of seeing Marshall arguing: "With controlled outrage, Marshall eloquently asserted the constitutional promise of equality for Sweatt, for all African Americans and, it seemed, for me personally." When the Court ruled in Sweatt's favor, Higginbotham later wrote, he felt that he had "witnessed the birth of racial justice in the Supreme Court." Higginbotham received his Bachelor of Laws from Yale in 1952. In 1969, as the first black person to become a trustee of Yale, he advocated opening the university's undergraduate program to women.
After graduation, Higginbotham initially sought employment with law firms in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, however, he was unable to find work at any of the major firms as a result of his race. He began his career as a law clerk for Judge Curtis Bok of the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. In 1953 he was hired by Philadelphia County District Attorney Richardson Dilworth as an assistant district attorney. Prior to Dilworth's arrival, no black lawyer had ever argued on behalf of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the Courts of Common Pleas. Higginbotham was given the opportunity to argue both in front of the Court of Common Pleas, and the Superior Court of Pennsylvania.
In 1954 Higginbotham went into private practice as a member of the first African American law firm in Philadelphia, Norris, Schmidt, Green, Harris, and Higginbotham. In addition to Higginbotham, three of the other named partners went on to become judges; Harvey Schmidt and Doris Harris would later serve as judges on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, and Clifford Scott Green was appointed to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Higginbotham stayed in private practice until 1962. While at the firm, Higginbotham practiced criminal defense and personal injury law. From 1960 to 1962 he was President of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP.
While still in private practice, Higginbotham simultaneously served in several government positions; he was a special Deputy State Attorney General from 1956 to 1962, a special hearing officer for conscientious objections for the United States Department of Justice from 1960 to 1962, and a Commissioner on the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission from 1961 to 1962. He was a faculty member of the Rutgers University Law School.