Allen M. Howard, 1938-2025
By Robert W. Snyder
When history professor Allen M. Howard died on July 4, 2025 at the age of 87, Rutgers lost a piece of its own history and I lost a friend and mentor of fifty years. I first met Al at Livingston College, where in the fall of 1975 I took his course “Oral History and Fieldwork.” The course was proof of Al’s strength as a historian and teacher and a testament to the possibilities of oral history.
I enrolled because oral history seemed to stand at the intersection of history and journalism, a place that defined my undergraduate education and eventually my career. What I hadn’t counted on was the intellectual breadth of the course, which embraced the craft of oral history, the place of oral history in historical analysis, and oral tradition in Africa.
The key to all of this was Al, who was a historian of exceptional range, the most rigorous professor I ever studied with, and the kindest man I have ever known.
Educated at the University of Wisconsin, he earned a B.S. in biology before shifting directions and earning an M.A.in history. In 1963 he went to Sierra Leone, where he taught at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, studied the Krio and Temne languages, and traveled extensively. He researched African economic history and the spatial dynamics of trade and interviewed Muslim traders about their religious and kinship networks.
Al returned to the United States for doctoral study at Wisconsin in 1966. Drawn to Livingston by the college’s experimental philosophy, its engagement with urban issues, and the opportunity to work with African American students, he became one of the school’s founding faculty members in 1969. He earned his doctorate in 1972.
Al’s work in and on Africa was bound up with oral history. At the University of Wisconsin, he was much influenced by the historian Jan Vansina, who showed that the rigorous study of African oral traditions could illuminate African history prior to contact with Europeans
At Livingston Al introduced us to the design of oral history projects and the craft of fieldwork, then pushed on to explore the uses and meanings of oral history. Was our goal to gather factual information about the past, or was it to understand how people think about their lives and their own history? Al was a historian of Africa, but he looked far beyond his specialty to understand the significance of oral history.
To sharpen our ideas, we read work by people as varied as Vansina and the widely popular oral historian Studs Terkel. Al brought in as a guest lecturer Ron Grele, a historian with a Rutgers Ph.D. who was on his way to becoming an international leader in oral history. Ron valued oral history for its potential to make history more democratic and, at the same time, thought it needed to be explored with analytical rigor. With Al and Ron, oral history was world history.
Inspired and challenged, I conducted an oral history of Free Acres, a community in Berkeley Heights, NJ that was founded in 1910 by supporters of Henry George, the political economist who thought that the solution to inequality was a single tax on the rising value of land. Today, the project is filed in the Free Acres Association Collection in Special Collections at Alexander Library.
Al’s course was the beginning of my work in oral history. Over the years I’ve applied it in my journalism and in four books, most recently When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers.
Al taught oral history into the 1980s, when Elisa Rossetti took a course with him. She conducted an oral history of New Brunswick Highlands, a, African American community in Piscataway. Like me, she found in Al a mentor and a friend. Her essay grounded in the project, “New Brunswick Highlands: Study in Collective Social Consciousness,” is an insightful story of migration, struggle, and resilience in the face of racism.
Even after Al stopped teaching oral history, he remained engaged with the practice. Shaun Illingworth, director of the Rutgers Oral History Archive (ROHA), remembers him as “very friendly” to the archive and its staff. “When we were neighbors on the third floor of 88 College Avenue, he would frequently help us out, even letting our students use his office since ours was a little cramped when they all came in to work,” Illingworth said.
And Al continued to apply oral history in his own work. Interviews informed his final project, a book in progress on West African trade and traders based on his extensive oral interviews and fieldwork in northern Sierra Leone and south eastern Guinea. Ismail Rashid, chair of the History Department at Vassar College, and an old friend of Al’s, hopes to see the manuscript published.
Al spent his final days at Stonebridge at Montgomery, a retirement community in Skillman, NJ. There, by sweet coincidence, many of the staff were immigrants from Sierra Leone. They enjoyed speaking to him in Krio, the lingua franca of Sierra Leone, appreciated the African music in his extensive CD collection, and brought him home-cooked food prepared in the traditions of Sierra Leone.
Robert W. Snyder graduated from Livingston College in 1977. He is professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University and Manhattan Borough Historian.
To read more about Al Howard's life told in his own words in a two-part oral history interview with the Rutgers Oral History Archives, click here.