By Helen Kull
William Lanning. Harvey Fisk. Alfred Reed. William Antheil. Gilmore Fisher. Francis Lore. Over the past two years I’ve explored these one-time Ewing residents, who made their mark on the greater community and were honored for their contributions by having a school named after them, immortalizing their name and life’s work.
There should have been another.
There isn’t, because the obvious choice — his Ewing grammar school — was closed before he attained widespread fame.
Ewing currently lacks anything that officially honors A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. — lawyer, public servant, adviser, federal judge, professor and civil rights advocate.
Higginbotham was born in 1928 in a sparse home on Pennsylvania Avenue in Ewing, the son of an uneducated domestic worker and second generation laborer at the C.V. Hill factory in Trenton.
In the ‘30’s, he attended the racially segregated Ewing Park Grammar School, which once stood at the corner of Somerset and Georgia avenues, just four blocks away from Pennington Road at Somerset.
While the white children were bused to other schools “with libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums, language teachers and science teachers,” Ewing Park was a four-room school house, where each teacher taught three grades, and little more than the three Rs.
After completing eighth grade, Ewing students then went to secondary school in Trenton. Ewing Park students went to the segregated Lincoln School on North Montgomery Street.
But because Ewing Park didn’t offer Latin, they were never placed in the “academic” program of study, with its Latin pre-requisite.
But Higginbotham clearly had talent, and advocates who believed in him. His mother knew that he was just as capable as the children of her well-to-do employers. Full of confidence, hope and determination, she convinced the Lincoln School principal to enroll Higginbotham in the academic track.
Higginbotham was registered in the second year Latin course, without having taken the first year course. He was again blessed by a wonderful advocate, teacher Bernice Munce, who passed him mostly for his effort. She then offered to tutor him. He rode his bike 20 miles to Hamilton to study with her several times a week.
He excelled in high school, and was accepted to Purdue University in 1944 to study engineering as one of 12 black students among a student body of 6,000. However, at Purdue it was the challenges that steeled him to pursue his rights.
As a 16-year-old freshman, he was housed with the other 11 black students in the unheated attic of a campus house. The intolerable winter conditions sent Higginbotham to the university president to request a section of a warm dorm where they could live.
President Edward Elliott responded that “the law doesn’t require us to let colored students in the dorm. We will never do it, and you must either accept things as they are or leave.” Stunned, he immediately decided to pursue law instead, to understand how the legal system could allow this.
Since he couldn’t accept things as they are, he transferred to Antioch College in Ohio, which was seeking to attract black students. He was the first black male to attend Antioch, and entered with Miss Coretta Scott as a classmate – the future Mrs. Martin Luther King.
Excelling once again, Higginbotham pursued law school, and was offered full tuition at Rutgers Law. But the Antioch Board of Trustees included a Yale grad, who encouraged Higginbotham to strive for Yale, which came with only a partial scholarship.
He chose Yale, and was awarded more honors in oral advocacy at Yale than anyone else while he was there.
Higginbotham went on to become the youngest and first African American District Attorney in the City of Philadelphia; a founding partner of the first black law firm in Philadelphia; and President of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP. President Kennedy appointed him to the Federal Trade Commission; Johnson appointed him as a federal judge; and Carter appointed him to the US Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Upon his retirement in 1993, Judge Higginbotham taught law at Harvard, and was a consultant to Nelson Mandela. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and honorary degrees from 60+ universities. He died in 1998 in Massachusetts.
Another fine Ewing son, whose name should be immortalized in Ewing!
Note: I am indebted to a copy of a speech by Judge Higginbotham for the information in this column: “The Dream with Its Back Against the Wall,” given at Yale Law School’s Alumni Weekend in 1989. I heartily recommend reading it in its entirety! www.law.yale.edu/news/3321.htm.
Helen Kull, a 36-year resident of Ewing Township, is president of the Ewing Historic Preservation Society.
