William L. Taylor’s death on June 28th deprived the civil rights community of a valued friend and colleague and America of a stalwart champion of freedom. We at the Legal Defense Fund were especially affected because Bill Taylor’s first job out of Yale Law School in 1954 was at LDF, working under Thurgood Marshall, as was mentioned in the brief tribute LDF posted on its website. We have reprinted that tribute here as an introduction to what should be required reading for all interested in fully understanding the work of the multi-racial “beloved community” that in the middle of the twentieth century propelled the black American civil rights struggle and struggle for American democracy.

– The Editors

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Mourns the Passing of
William L. Taylor

William L. Taylor

William L. Taylor’s name was not well known outside of organizations and the community of educators, state and local legislators, Congressional officeholders and federal officials who were intimately involved with civil rights issues. But all of America is in his debt; for few individuals in the last half-century had as much impact on securing and expanding the rights all Americans now enjoy. His commitment to that cause and his understanding of how to best influence both ordinary citizens and policy-makers to support it was legendary and invaluable. As a young attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in the mid-1950s, Bill Taylor went straight to the front lines of the fight for African Americans’ civil rights: the Little Rock school desegregation case. Working with the LDF team led by Thurgood Marshall, Taylor wrote much of the brief which in 1958 convinced the Supreme Court not to let the tumultuous first year of desegregation at Central High School derail the Court’s desegregation mandate. Over the course of the next half-century, Bill Taylor never left the front lines. Whether as general counsel and staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights during the 1960s, founding two non-profit institutes to expand support for civil rights, or serving as vice-chair of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Bill Taylor was an always astute and inspiring presence in the ongoing struggle to make America a more perfect union.

“A White Guy Like Me”

Reprinted from The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, by William L. Taylor, (2004) by permission of The Perseus Books Group.

I have had the good fortune to be a participant, not just a spectator, in the enormous social transformations of American life that occurred during the last half of the twentieth century. I see the changes in my everyday life and in the status of people of color, women, and people with disabilities. When I take a walk in my middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C., or when I go shopping, I encounter as many people of color as I do whites. When I go to sessions of the D.C. Bar, many of them are led by African Americans (and women). When I travel around the country to make speeches to educators or community groups, people of color play prominent roles in those. When I go to my medical center, I am likely to be cared for by a woman physician. Some years ago, Gallaudet College, an institution for the deaf, established a branch in my neighborhood, and students on the street engaged in animated conversations in sign language, where once they would have been hidden away.

The dry statistics show that the African-American middle class quadrupled over the last half-century, that other people of color, including Hispanics and Asian Americans, have advanced economically and politically, and that women now play prominent roles in all walks of life. It is not, however, just a matter of statistics; the quality of American life has changed dramatically for a great many people.

At the same time, there are millions of poor people of color who have been left largely untouched by the civil rights revolution. I do not see them on a daily basis as I tend to see more affluent people. But I know from my experience in central cities in years past that they are there and they continue to live in poverty, facing discrimination on a daily basis. I also learned a great deal from the accounts of my late wife, Harriett, who was a trial judge in the District of Columbia for seventeen years and who handled landlord-tenant cases, child abuse and neglect cases, and drug and murder prosecutions, as well as other matters. She described vividly the frustrations of living in a resource-starved, dysfunctional society, and the potential talent among young people that was buried in this environment.

While much of this seems familiar, I believe that a very large segment of middle-class Americans blocks out these images, both positive and negative. Many people of a conservative bent have convinced themselves that the battle for civil rights has been won and that no further measures are needed to secure equal opportunity. In the minds of conservatives, ghetto residents have literally become Ralph Ellison’s invisible man or are stereotyped as so shiftless as to be beyond help.

What may be more surprising is the propensity of some liberals to believe that the last half century has brought no real progress for African Americans. In some cases this view may stem from a gloomy habit of mind that tends to see everything through dark lenses. In other cases, this kind of rhetorical excess may be thought of as a strategic means of creating a sense of urgency to engage in new battles. If so, I think it will be counterproductive. I£ the extraordinary legal, political, and community efforts of the civil rights movement over the past half century have ended in abject failure, if American society is irredeemably racist, what chance is there that new efforts will succeed?

More than anything, I think that both the conservative and liberal extremes stem from a self-imposed isolation that prevents people from seeing clearly the society in which they live. We all create cocoons for ourselves—families and communities that enable us to escape the hard knocks of competing in the workaday world and to establish relationships with people who share our values, But to the extent that these communities are homogenous, that they are stratified along lines of class and color, they exclude from our vision large parts of society. Certainly, television as well as books and newspapers can expand our knowledge, but in some ways I have come to think of television and much of the other popular media as fun-house mirrors-reflecting but distorting at the same time.

So there will be an element of advocacy in this memoir – something that will not surprise people who know me. 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.

I also want through this memoir to examine how the process of institutional change has worked in civil rights. I have been involved in big court cases, in major legislative efforts, in planning civil rights strategy, and in persuading people with power or influence to do the right thing. Without becoming overly enmeshed in minutiae, I hope to offer some useful insights into these processes.

Working for social change teaches lessons of humility. The huge transformations that have occurred during my lifetime have not primarily been a product of rational planning and calculation. Change has been triggered by the enormous leadership qualities of Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Mahatma Gandhi in India, and even more so by the loyalty they inspired, the repression their work evoked, and the ways in which all of this touched the national conscience. The contribution that the rest of us have made has been to know how to take advantage of the tidal waves of change, to craft and implement the laws and policies that enable people to improve their own lives.

Within the limits of my capacity for personal introspection, I will also seek to address a question that Roger Wilkins, a friend of fifty years, suggested I write about: “What leads a white guy like you to spend his whole professional life working on behalf of black people?” In the next chapter I will discuss some of the early influences that shaped my future: growing up Jewish in New York City in an era of anti-Semitism at home while the Holocaust raged in Europe; being part of a family and a nation that watched admiringly as FDR used the powers of government to help people crushed by the Depression; learning about civil rights by following the career and courage of Jackie Robinson as he broke the color line in baseball.

I also know that I had my sights trained on a career of public service at a fairly early age. When in college I met the woman who would become my wife, she told me of her hopes to become a lawyer. In the 1950s this was still regarded as a pioneering move for women, and members of Harriett’s family discouraged her. When I urged her to pursue her dream, some friends thought I was an early feminist. In fact, as I told Harriett then, since I expected to have a very limited income as a public-interest lawyer, it would be good to have two wage earners in the family.

In part it was fortuitous timing – graduating from law school in the year of the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown – that got me into civil rights work. Why have I stayed in it? There were times, particularly early in my career, when some of the people whom I admired most were suggesting other possibilities for me. When I was getting ready to leave the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1958, Thurgood Marshall said he would contact a couple of large law firms that he thought I might find congenial. Years later, when I was preparing to leave the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Father Ted Hesburgh of Notre Dame and John Hannah of Michigan State said they thought I might make a good college president and offered to help. Nobody made me an offer I could not refuse and nothing came of those suggestions. I have no idea what path I might have followed if something outside of civil rights work had been presented to me in an irresistible fashion.

Still I think the reasons I have persevered are far more positive than negative or merely from the lack of something else to do. At the end of the 1960s when the black power movement gained ascendancy, many African Americans, including some of my closest friends, decided that white participation in the movement was too often patronizing or hypocritical and that in any event they preferred to act without whites, and they pushed us away. At that point I was impelled to examine my own reasons for being a civil rights lawyer. I decided that I was doing the work I did not for anyone else, but for myself – to help shape the kind of world that I wanted to live in and would want my children and grandchildren to live in. Fortunately, the black-white tensions of the late ’60s and early ’7Os have subsided, and many people are working together harmoniously and with a sense of common purpose. But if a new era of tension were to arise I think my resolve would not weaken and my feelings would be the same.

The fact is that I love the professional life I have led. Trying to puzzle out the dilemma of race has provided me with a lifelong education, not simply in the law, but in the way institutions function and have an impact on peoples’ lives. I love going to new places and learning how people live. In recent years I have loved teaching and working with young people who are seeking purposes in life that are greater than themselves. And, of course, there are those rare wonderful moments when I can see the tangible results of our efforts on the lives of people who have sought only to be given a chance.

Like everyone else, I have had ups and downs. But I have rarely experienced a day when I got up thinking I didn’t have any work to pursue that was not useful and interesting and that I would rather stay in bed.

This is not meant to be a preachy book. It is a memoir about my experience and the perspectives it has given me. Over the course of a half century in civil rights work, I have witnessed acts of courage and heroism as well as acts of hypocrisy and cowardice. Some people have learned to live and work together in coalitions despite differing backgrounds and agendas, while others split over differences that may seem trivial in retrospect. Often, people have behaved in unexpected and funny ways. I have always liked to tell stories, and this seems like a good time and place to tell them. If an occasional moral pops up, so be it.