[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 9 (Wednesday, January 20, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E75-E76]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 IN MEMORY OF A. LEON HIGGINBOTHAM, JR.

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 19, 1999

  Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to A. Leon 
Higginbotham, Jr.
  Higginbotham, a noted civil rights defender who went on to become one 
of the country's most prominent African-American judges, recently died 
in Boston after suffering several strokes. He was 70.
  Throughout his life, as a judge and scholar, Mr. Higginbotham was 
known as a passionate defender of civil rights. The late Supreme Court 
Justice Thurgood Marshall once called him ``a great lawyer and a very 
great judge.''
  A native of Trenton, N.J., Higginbotham earned his law degree at Yale 
Law School.
  In 1962, President John F. Kennedy named him to the Federal Trade 
Commission, making him the FTC's first African-American commissioner.
  Higginbotham served as president of the Philadelphia chapter of the 
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 
1960-1962.
  In 1964, Higginbotham was appointed to the U.S. District Court in the 
Eastern District of Pennsylvania, becoming the third African-American 
federal district judge.
  Four years later, President Lyndon Johnson appointed him vice 
chairman of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of 
Violence, to investigate the urban riots of the 1960's. The resulting 
Kerner Report blamed the growing polarization between blacks and whites 
for the violence.
  Higgonbotham again broke new ground in 1969 when he became Yale's 
first African-American trustee.
  In 1977, he was appointed by President Jimmy Carter as judge of the 
3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In 1989, he became chief judge of 
the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Pennsylvania, New 
Jersey and Delaware.
  He retired from the bench in 1993 and became a public service 
professor of jurisprudence at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of 
Government.
  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.
  Mr. Higginbotham was awarded the nation's highest civilian award, the 
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a year after he was honored with 
the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award.
  In 1995, the American Association of University Professors appointed 
Higginbotham to its panel to investigate the University of California 
Board of Regents' decision to end race-based affirmative action.

[[Page E76]]

  Recently, Mr. Higginbotham urged the House Judiciary Committee not to 
impeach President Clinton. ``Perjury has graduations. Some are serious, 
some are less,'' he testifed. ``If the president broke the 55-mph speed 
limit and said under oath he was going 49, that would not be an 
impeachable high crime. And neither is this.''
  Mr. Higginbotham is also acclaimed for his multivolume study of race, 
``Race and the American Legal Process.'' In those books, he examined 
how colonial law was linked to slavery and racism, and examined how the 
post emancipation legal system continued to perpetuate oppression of 
blacks.
  At the time of his death, Higginbotham was working on an 
autobiography.
  He leaves his wife, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, a professor of 
history and Afro-American studies at Harvard; two daughters, Karen and 
Nia; and two sons, Stephen and Kenneth.

                          ____________________