A. Leon Higginbotham Jr.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. grew up in segregated Trenton, New Jersey, where his mother worked as a maid and his father as a factory worker, determined that education would be his path forward. A formative incident during his first year at Purdue University, where he and eleven other Black students were assigned to a crowded, unheated attic, redirected him from engineering toward law, and he transferred to Antioch College before graduating with honours from Yale Law School.

Higginbotham became the youngest and first Black Assistant District Attorney in Philadelphia's history at 25, and at 34 the youngest person ever named a Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission and its first Black commissioner. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson appointed him the first Black federal judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a post he held for thirteen years before President Jimmy Carter elevated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1977.

In 1990, Higginbotham became Chief Judge of the Third Circuit, at the time the only Black American directing one of the federal judiciary's twelve circuits. Beyond the bench, he authored two acclaimed books, In the Matter of Color and Shades of Freedom, tracing the legal history of race in America, and served as an adviser to President Johnson following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.