Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

Fall 2026
W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham smiling directly at the camera against a solid gray background

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. A tenured faculty member at Harvard since 1993, she chaired Harvard’s Department of African and African Americans Studies from 2006-2013, and chaired Harvard’s History Department from 2018-2020. Higginbotham served from 2016-2021 as the national president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which was founded in 1915 by Carter G. Woodson, the “Father of Black History.” A pioneering scholar in African American women’s history, she authored the prizewinning book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, from which came her widely discussed conceptualization “the politics of respectability.”  She is also co-author with the late John Hope Franklin of the classic text From Slavery to Freedom, which was first published in 1947. She has continued the book’s long life, having written the ninth edition (2011), tenth edition (2021), and now the 2026 release. Higginbotham is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, the most notable being the National Humanities Medal presented to her by President Barack Obama at the White House in September 2015 for “illuminating the African American journey.” Most recently, in January 2024 the American Historical Association honored her lifetime of achievement with its prestigious Award for Scholarly Distinction. 

John Hope Franklin and the Weapon of History

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s fellowship project is the biography John Hope Franklin and the Weapon of History. When thinking of the greatest Black historians in the twentieth century, three names come readily to mind: W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and John Hope Franklin. Although all three men received the PhD in History from Harvard and linked the scholarly study of Black people in the United States and world to the pursuit of racial self-respect and racial equality, this biographical account of Franklin calls attention to the generational differences between him and his two illustrious predecessors. Neither Du Bois, born in 1868, or Woodson, born in 1875, lived to see the civil rights and voting rights legislation enacted in the 1960s, while Franklin, born in 1915, emerged as one of the greatest beneficiaries of the hard-won victories from litigation in the courts and mass demonstrations in the streets of America.  No stranger to the painful indignities of racist customs, violence, and Jim Crow laws as a child and young adult, Franklin would come to enjoy unprecedented opportunities throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Noted for holding prestigious positions as the “first of his race” in white university settings and in academic and other professional associations, Franklin is no less noted for his participation in settings related to legal strategizing, protest marches, government-sponsored town halls, public policy roundtables, and international endeavors. Thus, Higginbotham’s biography examines and analyzes Franklin’s activities and ideas about the historian’s role in these numerous settings, since historical narratives, according to Franklin, have long functioned as “intangible weapons.”