December 9, 2004 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Passion of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement
by William L. Taylor
In 1954, at age 23, William L. Taylor went to work as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and began a career devoted to furthering civil rights. His memoir discusses the successes of the civil-rights movement and the challenges that still face those fighting for social justice.
The book offers an insider’s look at the movement that led to major civil-rights legislation of the 1950s and ‘60s. Mr. Taylor describes his early efforts to expand the reach of Brown v. Board of Education, which prohibited segregation in public schools, and drafting the NAACP’s legal arguments in the Supreme Court case that eventually forced schools in Little Rock, Ark., to integrate.
His book also focuses on the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the following year, and how that legislation changed the lives of ordinary people he met throughout the country. He describes the excitement of those early years, when public attention and the news media were focused on the rapidly changing scene of race relations. In a chapter on his time as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, from 1965 to 1968, Mr. Taylor talks about efforts to enforce civil rights in the South and to draw national attention to the inequities facing the urban poor.
Mr. Taylor’s story demonstrates the crucial role played by nonprofit organizations in promoting racial equality. With money from the Ford Foundation, he established the Center for National Policy Review, in Washington, in 1970 to monitor federal agencies’ enforcement of civil-rights laws.
His book also discusses more-recent battles, such as his efforts four years ago to prevent the confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general. While Mr. Taylor laments the resurgence of conservatism in American politics and the country’s growing economic inequality, his vision for the future is a positive one. He points to tthe growing number of minorities in positions of power and increased contact among young people of different races. But in the coming years, he says, progress will most likely come not through the courts but through grass-roots organizing and other efforts that start at the local level.
Publisher: Carroll & Graf, 245 West 17th Street, 11th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10011; (212) 981-9919; fax (646) 375-2571; http://www.carrollandgraf.com; 252 pages; $26; ISBN 0-7867-1424-7.
