“The present doesn’t just appear tabula rasa and it doesn’t just appear,” Higginbotham warns. “There are all kinds of events, visions and implications that bring us to where we are.”
When Higginbotham, history department chair and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, thinks of the word history, it is more than a word that has been a large part of her vocabulary; it is something she has committed her life to through her scholarship, teaching and leadership as president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).
Dr. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
“History, for me, is a way to talk not just about the past, but to use the past for inspiration, for information, for a lot of different things,” says Higginbotham.
With a mother — Alma Elaine Campbell, who taught history — and a father — Dr. Albert N.D. Brooks, who served as secretary treasurer under ASALH’s founder Dr. Carter G. Woodson — Higginbotham recalls numerous weekend visits in her early childhood to the association’s D.C.-based office. Here, she would watch her father work and edit the association’s Negro History Bulletin.
“He was just constantly at that address – 1538 9th Street NW,” Higginbotham says. “He would say, ‘We would disprove the lie that the Negro has no history or none worthy of respect,’ and every week, I grew up hearing that.”
