William L. Taylor papers

William Lewis Taylor (October 4, 1931–June 28, 2010) was a lawyer and civil rights activist whose career spanned an extraordinary period in American civil rights history, from 1954 to his death in 2010 at age 78. For over five decades, he advocated tirelessly on behalf of African-Americans facing discrimination in education, housing, and voting, and played a key role in writing federal laws guaranteeing the rights of all Americans regardless of race. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1954, Taylor began his career working for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, assisting with civil rights cases in the wake of the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1958, after the school board in Little Rock bowed to local resistance and suspended desegregation efforts, Taylor helped write the NAACP legal brief that persuaded the Supreme Court to require schools to comply with the Brown decision.

In the 1960s, as general counsel and staff director for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in the Johnson administration, he led the investigations into racial discrimination that laid the groundwork for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Soon after, he went on to found his own civil rights organizations, first the Center for National Policy Review at Catholic University, and later the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, where he focused on the implementation of federal civil rights laws and on school desegregation litigation. Since 1982, he also served as vice chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington, working to pass and strengthen civil rights legislation.

Most recently, Taylor focused his work on accountability in education, working to close the achievement gap in American schools and ensure a quality education for all students. He helped draft the 2002 No Child Left Behind legislation and defended it against challenges. He received the first Thurgood Marshall Award from the District of Columbia Bar in 1993, and the Hubert H. Humphrey Award from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 2001.

In 2004 he wrote his autobiography, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, in which he summarized his message to the next generation: “I want to convince people whose minds are open that the work of providing opportunity to those who are worst off in this society is not done. And I want to convince the pessimists that change is possible—that if the Kings and Marshalls could overcome the enormous barriers of the last century, modern advocates should not despair.”