Rather, they live through the intellectual lineages they create, the people they train, and the students they teach. Academic giants never truly cease to exist. Raboteau’s greatest legacy is his students. Yet, amid all these accomplishments, perhaps Dr. Raboteau’s scholarly project of rendering Black, Brown, and immigrant humanity more legible is even more critical and visionary. In a context that continues to witness the senseless deaths of Black and Brown people via state-sanctioned violence, Dr.

From the 1996 collection of essays A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African American Religious History to the 2008 co-edited volume Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives to the 2012 memoir A Sorrowful Joy: A Spiritual Journey of an African American Man in Late Twentieth Century America, he amplified stories at the intersections of race and religion, all while challenging staid conventions regarding professional trajectories and academic voice. Raboteau’s subsequent publications continued to expand the range of voices and experiences reflected in scholarship about American religious life. His historical rendering not only inaugurated a new branch of historical scholarship, but more importantly, modeled a methodology in which everyday bondspeople were historical actors.ĭr. Raboteau narrated a world in which enslaved Africans and their southern descendants made calculated choices about where and how they created religious space, when and if they converted to Christianity, and the brand of Christianity they adopted upon conversion. Drawing upon sources ranging from institutional church records to missionary documents, Dr. The book was revolutionary not only in its content, but also its methodology. As the field of religious studies and the broader academic world grappled with the imperatives set forth by Black liberation theologians and Black nationalist historians, Slave Religion constituted the first full-length historical treatment of the religious strivings of enslaved southerners. Raboteau published Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South-unequivocally his most famous book-in 1978. Louis, Mississippi in 1943 and raised in Michigan and California, his scholarship reflected an abiding commitment to rendering the religious lives of African-descended people visible in history with an eye towards contemporary justice concerns.ĭr. Raboteau was a giant in the fields of Africana and American Religions specifically, and Religious Studies more broadly. Raboteau, one word has reverberated throughout the many tributes and posts celebrating his storied professional life: giant.

In the weeks following the passing of Dr.

Albert raboteau slave religion