Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Born	1945 (age 71–72) Washington, District of Columbia United States
Occupation	African American History Professor

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (born 1945) is a professor of Afro-American Studies, African American Religion and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Higginbotham wrote Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920 which won several awards. Higginbotham has also received several awards for her work, most notably the 2014 National Humanities Medal.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham was born in 1945 to Albert Neal Sow Brooks and his wife Alma Elaine Campbell. Higginbotham's father served as secretary treasurer for the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History as well as edited the organization's Negro History Bulletin. Her mother, Alma Elaine Campbell, a high school history teacher, later became the supervisor for history in the Washington, D.C. public school system.

Higginbotham often accompanied her father to his work, which allowed her to encounter and become familiar with many significant early African American historians, including Rayford Logan, Charles Wesley and Benjamin Quarles. Higginbotham later related how this unique experience shaped her later career choice, “I knew from childhood that I wanted to teach, research, and write about the history of African Americans." Stories her father told her of her family members also inspired her. Her great-grandather, Albert Royal Brooks, was born a slave in Virginia 1817, and after the American Civil War then began to serve on the jury to try former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Higginbotham's great-grandmother, Lucy Goode Brooks, created one of the first post-Civil War orphanages serving black children. Her grandfather, Walter Henderson Brooks, was a pastor at Nineteenth St. Baptist Church which is one of the oldest black Baptist congregations in Washington D.C. Higginbotham's aunt, Julia Evangeline Books, was one of the incorporators of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first African-American sorority.

“In many ways,” Higginbotham says, “the family stories inspired me to pursue the discipline of history and gave me an appreciation of the importance of individual lives, broadly speaking, as a lens or mirror to much larger social and political contexts.”

In 1969, Higginbothan received her B.A. history degree from the University of Wisconsin, then in 1974 went on to receive her M.A. history degree from Howard University. In 1975 she earned a certification in Archival Administration and Record Management from the U.S. National Archives. In 1977 she earned a certification in quantitative methodology in Social Science from the Newberry Library in Chicago. In 1984 she received her Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Rochester. She also married A. Leon Higginbotham.

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