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.#
