Civil rights attorney William L. Taylor is being remembered throughout the nation for his 50-year career for fighting for the rights of African Americans. He has a personal tie to St. Louis as the lead attorney in the 1980s St. Louis schools education reform negotiations, which resulted in a voluntary interdistrict plan.
As a young lawyer, Taylor worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund alongside future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on school desegregation cases. He litigated civil rights cases following the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation case.
“William Taylor embraced his status as a staunch advocate for educational equity throughout his storied legal career,” said NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous. “His contributions to the desegregation of our nation’s education system were unparalleled and invaluable, and we will miss him.”
Taylor went on to become general counsel and staff director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
His research contributed to other key civil rights legislation as well, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
In a statement after his passing, the Commission wrote, “Mr. Taylor directed investigations and research that played an important role during the passage of Civil Rights Act and other civil rights legislation of the 1960s. During his tenure, the Commission held hearings around the country which contributed recommendations that formed the core of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was also the founder and chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights and vice chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.”
In his autobiography, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, Taylor proudly quoted from one of his heroes, Oliver Wendell Holmes: “As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at the peril of being not to have lived.” Taylor showed that passion throughout more than a half-century of leadership that included successful efforts to pass civil rights legislation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. In later years and most recently, he worked on education reform legislation to advance opportunities for poor and minority children. He received the DC Bar’s first Thurgood Marshall Award in 1993 and taught law at Georgetown University Law School.
Taylor died Monday, June 28 in Bethesda Maryland, of fluid in his lungs, a complication of a head injury suffered in a fall a month ago. Taylor was 78 years old.
