Alrutheus Ambush Taylor

Alrutheus Ambush Taylor (1893–1954) was a historian from Washington D.C. He was a specialist in the history of blacks and segregation, especially during the Reconstruction Era. The Crisis cited him as a "painstaking scholar and authority on Negro history". An African-American, he taught at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute in West Virginia, and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Following a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, Taylor began researching the role of African Americans in the South during Reconstruction. He authored The Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction in 1924, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia in 1926, and The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880 in 1941.

Early life and education Taylor was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of Lewis and Lucy Johnson Taylor's nine children. He enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1910 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1916. Taylor was later rejected from the university's history graduate program by Ulrich B. Phillips, who cited Taylor's undergraduate focus in mathematics.

His earliest two published books, The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction in 1924, and The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, challenged the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography. Taylor died at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4, 1954, at the age of 62. He was buried with his wife's family in Fowler, Indiana.

Publications

The Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880 "Negro Congressmen a Generation After" "The Movement of Negroes from the East to the Gulf States from 1830 to 1850"