BY The Associated Press and The Cincinnati Enquirer
BOSTON — A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., a former federal appeals court judge and civil rights defender, died Monday after suffering a stroke. He was 70.
Mr. Higginbotham was appointed to the federal bench in 1964, becoming the third black federal district judge. In 1989, he became chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit. He retired from the bench in 1993 and became a public service professor of jurisprudence at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Judge Nathaniel Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati had known Mr. Higginbotham since both were college students — Mr. Jones at Youngstown, Ohio, and Mr. Higginbotham at Antioch in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
Judge Jones called Mr. Higginbotham a trailblazer, who demonstrated how the merging of race and law could affect change in society, refining the model shaped by Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall.
“He provided the effective road map for organizations and individuals to reshape institutions free of the cancer of racial injustice,” Judge Jones said.
Mr. Higginbotham found early encouragement in his formative years from former Cincinnati Mayor Theodore M. Berry and others.
In September, he told a Cincinnati audience that Mr. Berry was his “north star” as a black child growing up amid racism. He was in Cincinnati to deliver the first Theodore M. Berry Distinguished Lecture, sponsored by the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.
Ed Rigaud, executive director of the Freedom Center, said Mr. Higginbotham's reference to the north star affected all who heard it.
“He made the point that north star comes in all colors and genders,” Mr. Rigaud said. “It's the kind of message the Freedom Center wants to give to everyone.”
Mr. Higginbotham is also acclaimed for his multivolume study of race, Race and the American Legal Process.
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.”
In 1962, President Kennedy appointed him to the Federal Trade Commission, the first black on the job. Two years later, he was appointed to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
In 1968, he was appointed by President Johnson to the commission that investigated the urban riots of the 1960s. The resulting Kerner Report blamed the growing polarization of blacks and whites for the violence.
It was President Carter who elevated Mr. Higginbotham to the appeals court in the Virgin Islands in 1977.
Mr. Higginbotham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, a year after he was honored with the Raoul Wallenberg Humanitarian Award.
In recent months, Judge Jones said, friends and family were deeply concerned for the health of Mr. Higginbotham, who had undergone three open-heart surgeries in a short period of time.
“We all advised him to slow down,” he said. “He said that in all struggles for justice, someone must fall. He felt he was in a struggle for justice, and if it were his fate to fall, so be it.”
