William L. Taylor

William Lewis Taylor (October 4, 1931 – June 28, 2010) was a Jewish-American attorney, lobbyist and activist who advocated on behalf of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement and played a major role in drafting civil rights legislation.

Early life and education Taylor was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he was harassed by his anti-Semitic Italian neighbors, later recalling of his youth that "I remember being pushed around as a kid and being called a 'Christ killer'". In speeches over the years he said that as a Jewish teenager he had experienced anti-Semitism in a neighborhood that Jews shared mainly with Italians. He first became aware of anti-African American prejudice when he saw whites harassing Jackie Robinson, when he stepped over the baseball color line while playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Taylor attended Brooklyn College, where he was editor of the school paper but was suspended by the college's president for publishing an article that alleged that a professor had been declined tenure based on his political views. A decade after he graduated from the college in 1952, officials at the college implored federal officials not to hire him for a government job, saying that he had "espoused liberal causes such as the rights of the Negro in the South". Brooklyn College awarded Taylor an honorary degree in 2001, with college president Christoph M. Kimmich calling Taylor "a person who represents what this institution is all about".

In 1954, he earned his LL.B. degree from Yale Law School. He later taught at Columbus School of Law of The Catholic University of America, Georgetown University Law Center and at Stanford Law School. There he helped formulate a voluntary desegregation plan in the 1980s for the St. Louis, Missouri school system.

As vice chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights starting in 1982, Taylor helped revise civil rights legislation. He headed a team of lawyers that wrote a 75-page report early in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, criticizing the administration's interpretations of civil rights law. He was credited with developing the strategy by which liberal organizations recruited law professors to testify against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately failed in the United States Senate. He was survived by a son, two daughters, and three grandchildren. In 1954, he married Harriett Elaine Rosen, who died in 1997.