Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks
1945-present · Contribution: 1993-2009
Coined the influential concept of the “politics of respectability” in her landmark 1993 book Righteous Discontent, the first full scholarly account of Black women's central role in building the Black Baptist church into a vehicle for social and political change, and later revised and updated John Hope Franklin's foundational textbook From Slavery to Freedom
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Impact on the world
Drawing on a family history that included a great-grandfather born enslaved in Virginia who later served on a jury trying former Confederate officials, Higginbotham spent years researching the National Baptist Convention's Woman's Convention, the largest women's organization among Black Americans in the early twentieth century, for her 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920; the book won prizes from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Association of Black Women Historians, and its central concept — the “politics of respectability,” describing how Black women activists used middle-class self-presentation as a strategy for racial uplift and political advancement — became one of the most widely cited and debated frameworks in African American history. She went on to co-edit the twelve-volume African American National Biography with Henry Louis Gates Jr., also profiled in this collection, containing more than 5,000 biographical entries, and was entrusted with revising and updating the ninth edition of John Hope Franklin's field-defining From Slavery to Freedom following Franklin's death in 2009. President Obama awarded Higginbotham the National Humanities Medal in 2015 for “illuminating the African American journey,” and she served as national president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History — the organization founded by Carter G. Woodson — from 2016 to 2021, while also chairing Harvard's history department during that period.
Life & background
Born June 4, 1945, in Washington, D.C., to a historian father who edited the Negro History Bulletin and a history-teacher mother, Higginbotham earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, her M.A. from Howard University, and her Ph.D. in American history from the University of Rochester. She has taught at Harvard University since 1993, where she holds the Victor S. Thomas Professorship of History and of African and African American Studies, and continues to teach and publish on African American women's, religious, and civil rights history.
Sources
- American Historical Association; Harvard University Press; National Endowment for the Humanities
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