Both the Chair of the Center for African American Studies and the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. was born on Sept. 4, 1968, in Moss Point, Mississippi. He is a self-professed man of humble roots, as he said in a commencement speech at Colgate University on May 17, 2015.
“It is a humbling experience for a country boy…to find himself amid the stunning beauty of the Chenango Valley on this historic campus,” he said. “It is a long way from the reality of my mother who cleaned toilets for a living, and my father who delivered mail and flowers in the blistering heat of Mississippi summers.”
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Early Career
Dr. Glaude served as Student Government President at Morehouse College and gave the Founder’s Day Convocation keynote address at its 140th anniversary. He has two master’s degrees: One from Temple in African American studies and another from Princeton in religion. He earned his Ph.D. in religion at Princeton, joining the faculty in 2002 after starting his career at Bowdoin College.
His first book, Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth Century Black America, won the first Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize in 2001. In addition, he’s authored In A Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, African American Religion: A Very Short Introduction and Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul. He is also credited as the editor of Is It Nation Time? Contemporary Essays on Black Power and Black Nationalism and co-edited African American Religious Thought: An Anthology with Cornel West.
Teachings About Life
Dr. Glaude is a founding member and Senior Fellow of the Jamestown Project, which is, , a “diverse action-oriented think tank of new leaders who reach across boundaries and generations to make democracy real.”
In an interview with Bill Moyers from 2016, Moyers asked Glaude, “what’s our obligation, we privileged people?” (Moyers prefaced the question by saying that they both started out in poor communities; meanwhile, he now lives in “the heart of Manhattan” and Glaude teaches at Princeton.)
Glaude’s response? “To leverage our skills to open up space, for the most vulnerable, for the people who made us possible. And to breathe our last breath on behalf of them. To give them everything we can, to give them the possibility of not only making their dreams a reality; not only being able to dream dreams, but to make those dreams a reality.”
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Hero (Top) Feature Image: © Eddie S. Glaude Jr. / Princeton.edu
