The Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice mourns the passing of our beloved colleague and friend, William L. Taylor.  One of the nation’s most accomplished and revered civil rights lawyer-activists, Bill died June 28 of complications following a fall. He lived in Washington, D.C. and was 78 years old.

U.S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy once described Bill, aptly, as a “long-distance runner on the road to justice.” Bill began his long run in the 1950s, working for Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund. At LDF, Bill helped write the seminal brief in the case, Cooper v. Aaron that forced some of the nation’s most virulent segregationists to desegregate the schools in Little Rock Arkansas. A few years later, as general counsel for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Bill organized the investigative hearings on discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South. The findings and recommendations from those hearings would form the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act, in 1965. Soon afterward, Bill left government and launched two watchdog groups that pushed for stronger, more effective enforcement of civil rights laws. In the 1980s, in St. Louis, Bill led the legal negotiations that created the nation’s largest voluntary interdistrict school desegregation program. Most recently, Bill had focused on improving education standards and increasing opportunities for children to attend racially diverse schools.

CHHIRJ benefitted enormously from Bill’s vast experience and knowledge. He participated in many of our conferences and in dozens of meetings on school diversity and equal educational opportunity for children of color.  He was a willing, informative and entertaining panel member and workshop leader.  Early on, Bill helped shape CHHIRJ’s agenda on education. In recent months, he was an influential member of  an organization CHHIRJ helped create, the National Coalition on School Diversity, which advocates for changes in federal law and regulations to support integrated public schools. During conference calls and meetings, Bill often played the role of contrarian and always to good effect. He certainly had more than a bit of curmudgeon to him, did not mince words and loved a good argument. Bill was also warm, generous, self-deprecating and widely loved. He shared his wit and wisdom freely, spoke with clarity of purpose and moral authority. For the people at CHHIRJ and for hundreds of others who have had the privilege of working with him, Bill Taylor was a model of integrity.

“I have had the good fortune to be a participant, not just a spectator, in the enormous social transformation of American life that occurred during the last half of the twentieth century,” Bill wrote in his 2004 memoir, The Passion of My Times. “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.”

We have had the good fortune to have had Bill Taylor as a supporter, mentor and friend. We will miss him.