Nathan Huggins Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

In 1981 Huggins established the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectureship in Afro-American Life, History and Culture. Harvard students praised Huggins for “exceptional clarity and entertaining lectures” in a course he and a colleague taught on changing concepts of race in the United States.

Huggins held assistant professorships at California State University, Long Beach, Lake Forest College (Illinois), and the University of Massachusetts Boston. He served as visiting associate professor at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the faculty at Columbia University as a professor of history in 1970. Ten years later, Huggins accepted positions as the first W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and Afro-American Studies and Director of the Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University. He also taught outside the U.S. at the University of Heidelberg, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies of the Free University of Berlin, the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne.

Huggins studied at the University of California at Berkeley, receiving his A.B. degree in 1954 and M.A. in 1955. He studied at Harvard University, where he received his A.M. in 1957 and Ph.D. in history in 1962.

Nathan Irvin Huggins (January 14, 1927 – December 5, 1989) was a distinguished American historian, author and educator. As a leading scholar in the field of African American studies, he was W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of History and of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 62.

Huggins was born in Chicago, Illinois, on January 14, 1927. His father was Winston J. Huggins, an African-American waiter and railroad worker, and his mother was Marie Warsaw, a Jewish woman. When Huggins was 12 years old, his father left the family and his mother moved them to San Francisco, California. Marie Warsaw died two years later, leaving 14-year-old Nathan and his sister on their own. Huggins attended high school and worked as a warehouseman, longshoreman, and porter. Near the end of World War II, he was drafted and completed high school in the army. Huggins later used the GI Bill of Rights to enter the University of California, Berkeley.