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Early Life
Albert Jordy Raboteau was born in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in 1943. Three months before his birth, a white man killed his father. The man claimed self-defense and the case was never prosecuted, prompting Al’s mother, Mabel, to leave the South, taking Al and his sisters first to the Midwest and then to California. When he was four years old, his mother remarried. Royal L. Woods, an African American former priest, who left the priesthood because of racism in the Catholic Church, would have lasting impact on Al, teaching him Latin and Greek and, in a sense, starting his intellectual journey. Excelling in his studies, Al graduated from a Franciscan high school and entered what is now Loyola Marymount University at age sixteen. After finishing college in 1964, Al enrolled at the University of California– Berkeley to study English, completing his M.A. in 1966. He completed a degree in theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, two years later.
The years of intense academic training drew Al to teaching as a profession, which took him to Xavier University of Louisiana, an African American Catholic university in New Orleans, Louisiana, to assume his first teaching post. It was at Xavier that his desire to teach grew stronger, as did his interest in studying the cultures and religions of people of African descent. So he set his sights on Yale University, where he could study with esteemed scholar of American religion Sydney Ahlstrom, one of the first scholars to situate the black religious experience centrally within the context of the larger narrative of American religious history. Yale also had recently established an African American studies department, allowing Al to also study with the venerable John W. Blassingame, author of The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South.
It was at Yale that Al determined to make the study of black religion his life’s work. He recognized that answers to questions about the religious lives of black people and the black past would be found only in careful and sensitive historical examination. He became particularly interested in the religious lives of black slaves, and after a time of exhaustive research completed his Ph.D. studies in 1973 with a dissertation titled “Invisible Institution: The Origins and Conditions of Black Religion before Emancipation.”
Al stayed on at Yale after his doctoral studies to teach and to assume administrative responsibilities. He did the same at Berkeley, where he became associate professor of history and African American studies and associate dean of the College of Letters and Science.
Raboteau Comes to Princeton
In 1982, Al accepted an invitation to come and “check out” Princeton as a visiting professor. He did so and found that he liked Princeton very much and decided to stay, where he would remain for the for rest of his illustrious career. As a member of the religion department, Al set the bar very high for the exploration of African American religion, shaping not only the content of that exploration, but also the very structure of how to think about it. His influence on the field of African American religious history cannot be fully measured. It was just too large.
Professor of Religion
From his start at Princeton, Al distinguished himself as a most faithful citizen of the department and the University at large. In 1983, he was hired as full-time faculty in the religion department. In 1987, he was named the Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion and became chair of the religion department and served in that capacity until 1992.
From 1992 to 1993 he served as dean of the Graduate School, likely to help increase the recruitment efforts of African Americans that had been decreasing for several years. Even with offering full-support, long-term President’s Fellowships, their numbers and would continue to decrease through the end of the century given that some rivals offered full rides to all targeted minorities, not just their top-ranked black ones and with the judicial and popular turn away from affirmative action at the end of the century.
However, in the years that followed, Raboteau continued to serve in numerous capacities throughout the University: gave countless talks, taught hundreds of undergraduates, and mentored some of the finest graduate students the religion department ever had. In recognition of his years of service to the University and for exemplifying the highest standards in scholar¬ship, Raboteau received the Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities in 1998, and was awarded Princeton’s Martin Luther King Jr. Journey Award for Lifetime Service in 2006. President Shirley M. Tilghman said of him at that event that he was “a source of inspiration for all who wish to build the kind of society that Dr. King envisioned, a society in which the life of the mind and spirit propel us toward each other rather than apart, where suffering, if it must occur, is redemptive rather than destructive.”
Honored in Heidelberg
In addition to honors bestowed upon him at Princeton, Raboteau was the recipient of many other awards and honors. He held four honorary doctorates, and received a Guggenheim fellowship and a fellow¬ship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2012, the University of Heidelberg conferred on him the inaugural James W. C. Pennington Award, named in honor of an African American clergyman, author, abolitionist, and pacifist to whom the University of Heidelberg had granted an honorary degree in 1849. He also delivered a number of distinguished lectureships, including the Cole Lectures at Vanderbilt University, the Stone Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Saint Thomas More Lectures at Yale University, and the Ingersoll and Wit lectures at Harvard Divinity School.
As a result of his scholarship, Raboteau authored numerous articles, essays, book chapters, and reviews in some of the most distinguished journals and anthologies in the field of American and African American religious history.
It was for his first book, however, that Raboteau was best known. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South was a masterpiece that will endure for as long as the field of American religious history will endure. Developed from his Yale dissertation and published in 1978, Slave Religion was of inestimable value, having revealed and shaped what we know about the religion of African slaves in the United States and the very fabric of black religious life generally. For the last three decades, all books of any worth on the topic of African American religion have had to grapple with the arguments and assertions Al made in Slave Religion. His task was to correct long-standing false conceptions about the nature of slave religion and do so from the perspective of the slaves themselves. As he eloquently put it, the description of “slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel.”
We learned from Slave Religion that roots, remembrances, and fragments of the African past survived the terror of slavery, providing the basis for African American Christianity. More than merely embracing the religion of their oppressors, black Christians reframed and reimagined their faith, making it speak to and work from their own experiences. In this way, they transformed American Christianity, making it the basis of their hope for freedom and ultimate redemption. “In the secrecy of the quarters or the seclusion of the brush arbors (‘hush harbors’),” Raboteau wrote, “the slaves made Christianity their own.”
Raboteau said that his search for his father, who was so unjustly killed, led him to become a scholar of African American religious history. From that tragedy, then, some of the finest scholarship in the history of the field emerged. And perhaps it would be all for naught were it not the case that Raboteau was acknowledged as simply a superb human being. His kindness and generosity of spirit were legendary, and his mentorship was unmatched. He modeled before several generations of young scholars how to do research and how to teach—really teach. Raboteau left an indelible mark on the field of African American religious history, for sure, but few left so deep and wide a mark.
Primary Source:
Princeton University: Honors Faculty Members Receiving Emeritus Status, May 2013
Other References:
Albert Jordy Raboteau Princeton University faculty page Albert Raboteau
Princeton Religion Albert J. Raboteau, Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion
