Albert Raboteau Jr., influential Black religion scholar, dies at 78

Albert Raboteau Jr., the “godfather of Afro-Religious studies,” died from complications related to Lewy body dementia on September 18. He was 78.

For most of his career, Raboteau was considered one of the preeminent scholars of both Black religious history and American religious history. His 1978 book Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, which centered the perspectives of enslaved people, is still seen as one of the definitive books on the origins of the Black church.

Raboteau began his teaching career at Xavier University in New Orleans, the only historically Black Catholic college in the nation. In 1982, after positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yale, Raboteau joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he remained until his retirement in 2013. (See former student Yolanda Pierce’s remembrance on p. 10.)