The passing of long-time, indefatigable civil rights champion William L. Taylor at age 78 has special significance for all African Americans and for the African-American community in St. Louis in particular. Since his earliest days as a young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund with Thurgood Marshall where he wrote the Supreme Court brief for the case in which the nation’s highest court ruled unanimously that the Little Rock schools be integrated despite fierce local resistance, Taylor always made school desegregation a high priority. Here in St. Louis, he is best known for his negotiation of a voluntary desegregation plan for the public schools in St. Louis that provided the option for students in the city to seek educational opportunity outside the district.
It is still important to remember, in this era, his courage, steadfastness and total dedication to the civil rights movement. According to Ralph Neas, former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Taylor, the son of Lithuanian immigrants, was an integral participant in helping “strengthen every civil rights law, overturn more than a dozen abusive Supreme Court decisions and defeat the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork.”
Always on the front line in the pursuit of securing and expanding the rights of all Americans, he was an exemplar of the black-Jewish collaborative in advancing civil rights in this country. This history of cooperation between African Americans and Jews can be instructive during the current, sometimes tense, rift that plagues African-American and Jewish relationships. But we need to remember that despite the sharp disagreement between Republican and Democratic Jews in the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama received nearly 78 percent of the critical Jewish vote.
Notwithstanding any strain at the moment between African Americans and Jews, we must honor unequivocally and never forget the contributions of Bill Taylor, fittingly called by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy “a long distance runner” in the ongoing struggle for fairness, justice and positive change. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund aptly memorializes his life calling him, “an always astute and inspiring presence in the ongoing struggle to make America a more perfect union.”