Huggins, Nathan Irvin
1927-1989 · Contribution: 1971-1989
Wrote the landmark 1971 cultural history Harlem Renaissance, a National Book Award finalist still considered essential reading on the movement four decades later, and became Harvard's first W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies, building the university's Du Bois Institute into a leading center of Black scholarship
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Impact on the world
Orphaned at 14 after his Jewish immigrant mother's death and his Black father's earlier departure from the family, Huggins worked as a warehouseman, longshoreman, and porter before serving in the Army and earning degrees at Berkeley and Harvard; his 1971 book Harlem Renaissance examined the 1920s Black arts movement — including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Countee Cullen — through the lens of American culture and race more broadly, blending history, literature, music, and psychology into what The New York Times Book Review called a “brilliant” and “provocative” study. His 1977 book Black Odyssey: The African-American Ordeal in Slavery examined both the enslaved and the enslavers with what reviewers described as rare empathy and scholarly rigor, tracing the full impact of the Middle Passage on American society. In 1980 Huggins became the first W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies at Harvard and director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, where he expanded undergraduate engagement with the field and, in 1981, established the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectureship that continues to bring Black scholars from around the world to Harvard; he argued throughout his career that American history could not be properly understood without centering African American history within it, since the alternative was, in his words, effectively “white American history” presented as the whole story.
Life & background
Born January 14, 1927, in Chicago, Illinois, to a Black father and Jewish immigrant mother, Huggins was orphaned as a teenager and worked manual labor jobs before serving in the U.S. Army from 1945 to 1946 and earning his B.A. and M.A. at UC Berkeley and his M.A. and Ph.D. in history at Harvard by 1962. He taught at several colleges before joining Columbia University's faculty in 1970 and then Harvard in 1980 as its first W.E.B. Du Bois Professor, remaining there until his death from cancer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 5, 1989, at age 62.
Sources
- Harvard Square Library; American Historical Association (Perspectives on History); JRank Biography
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