Home About Us Media Kit Subscriptions Links Forum
APPEARED IN


View Select Articles

Download PDF

FAMOUS INTERVIEWS

Directories:

SCHOLARSHIPS & GRANTS

HELP WANTED

Tutors

Workshops

Events

Sections:

Books

Camps & Sports

Careers

Children’s Corner

Collected Features

Colleges

Cover Stories

Distance Learning

Editorials

Famous Interviews

Homeschooling

Medical Update

Metro Beat

Movies & Theater

Museums

Music, Art & Dance

Special Education

Spotlight On Schools

Teachers of the Month

Technology

Archives:

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

1995-2000


FEBRUARY 2006

William L. Taylor:
Passionate Advocate of the Civil Rights Movement

By Joan Baum, Ph.D.

The title of William L. Taylor’s influential, well received legal autobiography, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement—just out in paperback—is taken, he proudly points out, from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s comment that “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.”  What’s truly admirable—aside from the author’s declaration that he had “fun” writing it—is that for all of William Taylor’s over 50-year groundbreaking work as a civil rights attorney and advocate, putting his mind and body on the line to serve the cause of equal opportunity and racial justice, he’s still at it, the past alive in the present. Though a bit on in years, a fact totally belied by the energetic tenor of his voice and lively, focused humor, he continues to be as active as ever, going against the grain, if necessary, a fact recently attested to in a January 4, 2006 article about him in The New York Times by Samuel Freedman who called him “a grandee of the civil rights movement.” For sure, this particular eminence gris remains as dedicated and spirited as ever, even as he seems to be upsetting some of his long-time liberal base in advocating for No Child Left Behind (pause for compassionate chuckle).

A graduate of Abraßham Lincoln High School (“the year [his idol] Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers”); an alumnus of Brooklyn College, where he made waves opposing the authoritarian administration of the day, young Taylor, weaned on sensitivity to human rights by parents who lived in the glow of FED, attended Yale Law School, which still enjoys a reputation for public affairs and public service, a legacy of Justice William O. Douglas, and upon graduation in 1954 was soon putting  Holmes’s dictum of action and passion into practice. Starting out at the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, where he joined Thurgood Marshall and helped write the 1958 Little Rock desegregation brief, Taylor went on to become staff director at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and to found The Center for National Policy Review, at the same time teaching civil rights law at Catholic University. The sixties, of course, for any civil rights advocate, black and white, was a historic, tumultuous and dangerous period, but the results found expression, among other pieces of legislation Taylor helped write, in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Needless to say, William Taylor was in Natchez during Freedom Summer, a “palpably scary” time but “nobody turned back.” The Passion of My Times details with lively anecdotes and scrupulously fair analyses what the legal and political fight was like in those days following Brown v. Board of Education. It also reinforces his “passion” to realize Martin Luther King’s last dream to ensure equal opportunity for children living in poverty. 

What particularly distinguishes William Taylor, a distinguished Jewish fighter for the rights of African-Americans and other minorities, is how much he seems to have taken another Holmes pronouncement to heart: “A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.” Like the Rev. King, a “visionary” who would be pleased by many societal changes made since Selma, but deeply concerned at what still needs to be done for the poor and underprivileged, William Taylor, who acknowledges that he does not have answers to some questions, refuses despite enormous frustrations to yield to despair.  A coalition builder, he continues to lobby for subsidies for those who would engage in public interest law. He sees more idealism than a sense of hopelessness in today’s young graduates. He is amused by the attitude that implies that a successful civil rights attorney ought to think now about being “a real lawyer.” He persists in opposing “territoriality” that would ignore individual school success because it might threaten the status quo of entrenched bureaucracy. He recognizes but strives against the societal effects of the separation of people that results in concentrated areas of poverty, inequitable school funding, and thus unfair educational opportunity. His late wife Harriet Taylor was a Superior Court Judge and though none of his three children have entered law, they each, with multiple careers, have committed themselves to help reform society through the arts, self-empowerment programs and serving those with disabilities. In their way they have inherited and acted on William Taylor’s strong belief that anyone can—and should—try to make a difference, to be an agent of change.#

COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE

Name:

Email:
Show email
City:
State:

 


 

 

 

Education Update, Inc.
All material is copyrighted and may not be printed without express consent of the publisher. © 2009.