Bill Taylor

Since graduating from Brooklyn College and Yale Law School I have spent virtualy my entire fifty-year professional career as an advocate for civil rights. In the 50s, I served on the legal staff of Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund working to implement the Brown decision. In the 60s I was General Counsel and later Staff Director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, investigating the denial of voting and other rights in the South and denial of equal opportunty in the urban North. Our work formed the basis for the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s.

Since then I have established new civil rights groups and been a leader in coalitions that have fought successfully in Congress to preserve and extend previous gains. I have also had a gratifying career as a teacher at Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, Catholic University Law School, the Stanford School of Law and Education, and Georgetown Law School.

I met my wife, Harriet Rosen Taylor, at Brooklyn College. We were married for 43 years until her death in 1997. Our three children, Lauren, Deborah and David all have had interesting careers.

My memoirs, entitled The Passion of My Times: An Advocate's Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement , have recently been published.