[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 103 (Tuesday, July 13, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1291-E1293]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   IN REMEMBRANCE OF WILLIAM L. TAYLOR, LAWYER AND CHAMPION OF CIVIL 
                          RIGHTS AND EDUCATION

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 13, 2010

  Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Madam Speaker, our country lost a 
true education civil rights pioneer last week. William L. Taylor was a 
friend, an ally, a trusted advocate and true hero to our nation's 
children. His work helped all children succeed and profoundly impacted 
the way we educate children in this country. Both the Washington Post 
and the New York Times ran obituaries on his passing. I have submitted 
these for the Record as well as the eulogy by Ralph Neas given at his 
Memorial Services. Bill will be deeply missed. My thoughts and prayers 
are with the Taylor family during this difficult time.

               [From the Washington Post, June 30, 2010]

   William L. Taylor, 78; Washington Lawyer, Champion of Civil Rights

                            (By Emma Brown)

       William L. Taylor, 78, a Washington lawyer and civil rights 
     activist for more than half a century who fought 
     discrimination on many fronts and was particularly dedicated 
     to desegregating the nation's schools, died June 28 at 
     Suburban Hospital in Bethesda of complications from a fall.
       In a career spanning six decades, Mr. Taylor worked largely 
     behind the scenes in courtrooms and on Capitol Hill, advising 
     members of Congress, drafting legislation and taking 
     advantage of changing attitudes about race and equality to 
     strengthen the nation's civil rights laws and their 
     enforcement.
       One of his early mentors was Thurgood Marshall, who later 
     became the first African American Supreme Court justice. Mr. 
     Taylor went to work for Marshall at the NAACP Legal and 
     Education Defense Fund in 1954, months after the Supreme 
     Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision 
     outlawed public school segregation.
       In 1958, Mr. Taylor helped write the NAACP's legal brief 
     for the Supreme Court case that compelled schools in Little 
     Rock--and required schools across the nation--to comply with 
     Brown v. Board and integrate public schools.
       During the 1960s, Mr. Taylor was the general counsel and 
     staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He 
     played a key role in organizing on-the-ground hearings and 
     investigations into discrimination against African Americans 
     in the Deep South. The resulting recommendations by the 
     commission became the foundation for the 1964 Civil Rights 
     Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
       In the late 1960s, he left the government to become a 
     government watchdog. He launched two organizations to monitor 
     the government's efforts to enforce civil rights laws, the 
     Center for National Policy Review at Catholic University, 
     where he taught law, and later the Citizens' Commission on 
     Civil Rights.
       During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. 
     Bush, Mr. Taylor lobbied for and helped draft stronger laws 
     to address discrimination in housing, employment and voting. 
     He also was in the group that led the fight against Reagan's 
     nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. They examined 
     every article, every speech, every decision, every statement 
     that Robert Bork ever made and put together the book on 
     Bork--and that was literally and figuratively the foundation 
     for Bork's rejection by the Senate, said Ralph Neas, the 
     former executive director of the Leadership Conference on 
     Civil Rights, who chaired the Block Bork coalition.
       Mr. Taylor was perhaps best known for his efforts to force 
     states and cities to make good on the promise of equal 
     schools for all. Through the courts, he pressed for the 
     desegregation of a number of urban school districts. In St. 
     Louis, after a parent challenged the segregated school 
     system, Mr. Taylor led negotiations in the 1980s that 
     established the nation's largest voluntary metropolitan 
     school desegregation plan.
       In recent years, Mr. Taylor helped draft No Child Left 
     Behind, the 2002 federal law intended to boost the quality of 
     the nation's schools by measuring student progress on 
     standardized tests, and he defended it against legal 
     challenges. In his eyes, ensuring excellent schools for all 
     students was a matter of civil rights. ``He was a huge 
     champion for closing the achievement gap, for 
     accountability--just a hawk, and I use that as a huge 
     compliment because he was ever-vigilant about that cause,'' 
     said Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of education under 
     President George W. Bush.
       William Lewis Taylor was born Oct. 4, 1931, in Brooklyn, 
     N.Y., the son of Jewish emigrants from Lithuania. Growing up, 
     Mr. Taylor was the target of anti-Semitic slurs. He graduated 
     from high school in 1947, the same year that Jackie Robinson 
     went to bat for the Brooklyn Dodgers, drawing countless 
     racial insults as he broke the major league color barrier. 
     ``The very first awareness I had about prejudice against 
     blacks came from watching what Robinson went through,'' Mr. 
     Taylor said in a 1999 interview.
       In 1952, he graduated from Brooklyn College, where he met 
     his future wife, Harriett Rosen. He graduated from Yale 
     University's law school in 1954.
       Mr. Taylor had served since 1982 as vice chair of the 
     Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights in Washington 
     and taught education law at Georgetown University.
       His wife of 43 years, who became a D.C. Superior Court 
     judge, died in 1997.
       Survivors include their three children, Lauren R. Taylor of 
     Takoma Park, Debbie L. Taylor of San Francisco and David S. 
     Van Taylor of Brooklyn; a brother, Burton Taylor of 
     Rockville; and three grandchildren.
       At Brooklyn College, Mr. Taylor was editor of the campus 
     newspaper for two issues before it was shut down by the 
     college's president, Harry Gideonse, who thought the paper 
     was too sympathetic to Communist interests. When the New York 
     Times printed a story about the closing, Mr. Taylor recalled 
     in his 2004 memoir, ``The Passion of My Times,'' he was 
     called into Gideonse's office. ``I hate to ruin anyone's 
     career,'' he remembered the president saying, ``but in your 
     case, I'm prepared to make an exception.''
       Years later, Mr. Taylor obtained his FBI file, which showed 
     that college officials had urged the federal government not 
     to hire Mr. Taylor when he was being considered for the U.S. 
     Commission on Civil Rights. They criticized him for his 
     involvement with the student government, which one official 
     said had ``espoused liberal causes such as the rights of the 
     Negro in the South.''
       In 2001, Brooklyn College gave Mr. Taylor an honorary 
     degree, honoring his efforts to secure civil rights for all 
     Americans. ``It was a character-building experience,'' Mr. 
     Taylor said at the time. ``I learned that you could speak out 
     for things you believed in and that nothing bad would happen 
     to you. I have spent my life doing that.''
                                  ____


                [From the Washington Post, July 2, 2010]

          The Loss of Civil Rights Advocate William L. Taylor

       Bill Taylor was not one of those bold-face Washington 
     names--except to those in the civil rights movement. If you 
     were in that movement, you probably knew William L. Taylor, 
     who died Monday at the age of 78; and if you didn't know him, 
     you certainly knew what he had accomplished.
       For more than half a century, Mr. Taylor was at the center 
     of every major civil rights battle. As a young lawyer at the 
     NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, he wrote the Supreme 
     Court brief in Cooper v. Aaron, the case in which the 
     justices insisted that the Little Rock schools be 
     desegregated notwithstanding massive local resistance. He 
     worked not only to pass the landmark civil rights statutes of 
     the 1960s--the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights 
     Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968--but to ensure 
     their extension and rewriting in the face of hostile Supreme 
     Court decisions in the following decades. He focused 
     particularly on school desegregation--most notably 
     negotiating a voluntary desegregation plan for St. Louis 
     schools--and ensuring educational opportunity for students in 
     impoverished areas, a passion that led him to join forces 
     with the Bush administration in writing the No Child Left 
     Behind law. In his various roles, as general counsel and 
     staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, as 
     executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil 
     Rights, as a law professor and private practitioner, Mr. 
     Taylor was, in the words of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, 
     ``a long-distance runner on the road to justice.''
       The Brooklyn-born son of Lithuanian immigrants, Mr. Taylor 
     wrote in his memoir, ``The Passion of My Times,'' that he 
     turned up for work at the Legal Defense and Education Fund 
     fresh out of Yale Law School ``with virtually no interaction 
     with African Americans. Jackie Robinson provided my only 
     civil rights education.'' But his passion for civil rights, 
     like his passions for baseball and jazz, never waned. His 
     funeral Wednesday featured repeated references to Mr. 
     Taylor's strong, sometimes prickly, personality. ``He was 
     never afraid to share his side of the argument--whether or 
     not you wanted to hear it,'' his 13-year-old granddaughter, 
     Simone, wrote in a memoir read at the service. ``He knew when 
     to take a stand, and he

[[Page E1292]]

     knew when to hammer out a compromise with integrity,'' said 
     Rabbi David Saperstein, a longtime colleague.
       ``The strange thing about working in civil rights is that 
     you always feel that you are stuck in a period of great 
     difficulty,'' Mr. Taylor said in a 1999 interview with the 
     D.C. Bar magazine. ``There was tremendous resistance to the 
     Brown decision, and then we went through all of the 
     tumultuous violence of the 1960s. There were times when it 
     felt very grave, ugly and hateful. But every few years you 
     look up and realize that things have changed in fundamental 
     ways.'' Mr. Taylor helped bring about that fundamental 
     change.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, June 29, 2010]

          William Taylor, Vigorous Rights Defender, Dies at 78

                          (By Douglas Martin)

       William L. Taylor, who as a lawyer, lobbyist and government 
     official for more than a half century had significant roles 
     in pressing important civil rights cases and in drafting and 
     defending civil rights legislation--died Monday in Bethesda, 
     Md. He was 78 and lived in Washington. His son, David Van 
     Taylor, said the direct cause of death was fluid in his 
     lungs, a complication of a head injury he suffered in a fall 
     a month ago.
       William Taylor began his long fight for racial justice as a 
     young lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund 
     Inc. working with Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a 
     Supreme Court justice. He helped fight some of the difficult 
     civil rights battles that followed the Supreme Court order in 
     1954 that schools be desegregated. One assignment was writing 
     much of the brief that persuaded the court to order the 
     continued desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Ark., in 
     an extraordinary summer session in 1958. The local school 
     board had decided to suspend desegregation because of heated 
     resistance the previous year.
       Mr. Taylor went on to the United States Commission on Civil 
     Rights as general counsel and staff director during the 
     Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He directed research 
     that contributed to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 
     Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
       Later victories included negotiating a voluntary school 
     desegregation plan in St. Louis in the 1980s as well as deals 
     with other school systems. In a statement Tuesday, the 
     N.A.A.C.P. called Mr. Taylor ``a staunch advocate for 
     educational equity throughout his storied legal career.''
       Starting in 1982, Mr. Taylor used his position as vice 
     chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human 
     Rights to help renew and strengthen some of the major civil 
     rights legislation of the 1960s.
       He headed a team of lawyers assembled by the conference 
     that evaluated civil rights enforcement in the first year of 
     the Reagan administration. In a 75-page report, the lawyers 
     found that the administration had ``repudiated'' 
     constitutional interpretations by the Supreme Court that 
     protected rights and that it had attacked lower courts for 
     protecting minorities.
       ``For more than half a century, Bill Taylor's voice was 
     synonymous with equality,'' Representative George Miller, the 
     California Democrat who is chairman of the House Education 
     and Labor Committee, said in a statement.
       Mr. Taylor is also credited with helping to devise a 
     strategy by liberals to defeat President Ronald Reagan's 
     nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, 
     partly by recruiting well-known law professors to criticize 
     him. Mr. Taylor could sometimes be unpredictable, as when he 
     openly supported President George W. Bush's No Child Left 
     Behind law to overhaul education. Liberal critics called the 
     measure punitive, poorly financed and too oriented toward 
     standardized tests.
       William Lewis Taylor was born on Oct. 4, 1931 to first-
     generation immigrants from Lithuania in the Crown Heights 
     section of Brooklyn. 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. ``I 
     remember being pushed around as a kid and being called a 
     `Christ killer,' '' he once said. He became aware of 
     prejudice against blacks, he said, when he saw whites harass 
     Jackie Robinson when he broke baseball's color line in 1947.
       Mr. Taylor attended Brooklyn College, where he was editor 
     of the college newspaper. The college president suspended him 
     for printing an article that the president had objected to; 
     it said a professor had been denied tenure because of his 
     political views. A decade later, when Mr. Taylor was applying 
     for a job with the federal government, Brooklyn College 
     officials urged the government not to hire him. According to 
     his F.B.I. file, college officials said that as a student he 
     had ``espoused liberal causes such as the rights of the Negro 
     in the South,'' The New York Times reported in 2001.
       That year, in a gesture of both contrition and pride, 
     Brooklyn College awarded Mr. Taylor an honorary degree. 
     Christoph M. Kimmich, the college president, called him ``a 
     person who represents what this institution is about.''
       Mr. Taylor graduated from Brooklyn College in 1952 and Yale 
     Law School in 1954, wrote many articles and two books, and 
     taught at the law schools of the Catholic University of 
     America, Stanford and Georgetown.
       His wife, the former Harriett Elaine Rosen, a trial judge 
     in Washington for 17 years, died in 1997. In addition to his 
     son, Mr. Taylor is survived by his daughters, Lauren and 
     Deborah Taylor; his brother, Burton; and three grandchildren.
       In the 1950s, Mr. Taylor was a popular contestant on the 
     game show ``Tic-Tac-Dough,'' his son said. When producers 
     offered him answers, which would have guaranteed his 
     earnings, he refused. He later testified to a grand jury 
     investigating quiz show fraud. The jury foreman, who had 
     heard the testimony of other ``Tic-Tac-Dough'' contestants, 
     informed Mr. Taylor that he had won more money than anyone 
     else who had not taken answers. His son said that was a 
     lasting source of pride.
                                  ____


  Remarks of Ralph G. Neas, President and CEO, National Coalition on 
     Health Care, Memorial Service for William L. Taylor, Tifereth 
                        Synagogue, June 30, 2010

       Good Morning.
       Lauren, Debbie, David, Simone, Jesse, Nathaniel, Burt and 
     Susan, other members of the family and friends, I am honored 
     to be with you today.
       Sometimes in your life, you get lucky. It certainly 
     happened to me when I met my wife, Katy. It happened again 
     when our daughter, Maria, entered our lives. And it most 
     definitely happened one Spring day in 1974. My first boss, 
     Senator Edward W. Brooke, was fighting those who were trying 
     to undermine school desegregation.
       The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) offered to 
     help Senator Brooke. Into the office walked Arnie Aronson, 
     Clarence Mitchell, Joe Rauh, and Bill Taylor. At age 26, I 
     was in one room with this extraordinary group of individuals 
     who would mentor me for the next four decades. I did not know 
     it then, but I had just won the lottery. And, except for 
     Katy, no one has been with me more over that span of time 
     than Bill Taylor. Bill was one part mentor, one part side-
     kick. Whether it was civil rights advocacy, playing tennis, 
     discussing baseball, listening to jazz, or going to the 
     movies; we did it together.
       By the time I met Bill, he was in his forties. In many 
     ways, Bill, along with Mary Frances Berry and Raul Yzaguirre, 
     served as bridges between the great generation of the Rauhs, 
     Mitchells, Dorothy Heights, and Aronsons and that of my 
     peers, who were just coming of age--Marcia Greenberger, 
     Elaine Jones, David Saperstein, Antonia Hernandez, Judy 
     Lichtman, Barbara Arnwire, Wade Henderson, Nan Aron, Karen 
     Narasaki and so many others in this room.
       By the time we met, Bill already had a distinguished 
     professional career. Right out of Yale Law School, he joined 
     the staff of Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense and 
     Education Fund. His first major case was Cooper v. Aaron, the 
     historic 1958 Little Rock school desegregation decision. Now, 
     that's one hell of a way to begin a career!
       For the next 50 years, Bill continued his abiding interest 
     in equal educational opportunity, especially in important 
     school desegregation cases across the country. Bill went on 
     to become the head of the United States Commission on Civil 
     Rights where he supervised important investigative and 
     research work that helped lay the foundation for the 
     enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act 
     of 1965, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
       While Bill and I teamed up many times in the 1970's, our 
     real partnership began in April of 1981 when I became the 
     Executive Director of LCCR. For the next 12 years, we were 
     inseparable, constituting with the leaders I have mentioned 
     previously, a core group of strategists, organizers, lawyers, 
     and advocates that remained close and effective over the 
     years.
       But during the Reagan-Bush Administrations, Bill Taylor 
     helped the Civil Rights Movement perform the impossible. In 
     the face of huge resistance, LCCR directed two-dozen national 
     campaigns that strengthened every major civil rights law, 
     overturned more than a dozen adverse Supreme Court decisions, 
     and defeated the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. 
     Laws enacted included the 1982 Voting Rights Act, the Civil 
     Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Fair Housing Act 
     Amendments of 1988, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and the 
     Americans with Disabilities Act. Bill's role in all of these 
     hard fought victories was that of the indispensable senior 
     advisor.
       As essential as Bill was to my professional life, he was 
     also a vital part of my personal life. Indeed, Bill Taylor, 
     along with Mary Frances, actually lent me the money I needed 
     to buy an engagement ring for Katy. He then joined Katy and 
     me in Des Moines, Iowa, Thanksgiving 1988, to be a member of 
     our wedding party. Again with Mary Frances, Bill became a 
     Godparent to Maria in 1999.
       And Bill's wonderful 43 year marriage to Judge Harriett 
     Taylor had a profound impact on me. I have never observed a 
     better, warmer, more trusting partnership than theirs.
       In all of his endeavors, certain personal qualities about 
     Bill always stood out. First, was Bill's brilliance. His mind 
     was quick and facile, especially in moments when something 
     had to be forged that could command a bi-partisan legislative 
     consensus. Not surprisingly, Ted Kennedy, Hamilton Fish, and 
     Don Edwards were his best friends in Congress. Next, was his 
     exceptional sense of humor. Bill could really tell a story. 
     His puns, his pointed sarcasm, and quick wit always were 
     entertaining companions during a

[[Page E1293]]

     meal or a drink after work. And many times that humor defused 
     a tense situation.
       To be honest, one has to mention Bill's stubbornness, 
     sometimes accompanied by a strong temper. God, that man could 
     be unyielding. Bill always had a flair for the dramatic. And 
     Monday could not have been more a dramatic day. The 
     retirement of Justice John Paul Stevens. The first day of 
     Elena Kagen's Supreme Court nomination hearings. But perhaps 
     the most fascinating serendipity was the passing of Senator 
     Robert Byrd. Indeed, no one better personifies Bill's 
     unquenchable optimism in the truthfulness of Martin Luther 
     King's quote, ``That the arc of the moral universe is long 
     but it bends toward justice. In his 20's, Senator Byrd was a 
     member of the Ku Klux Klan. In his forties, he filibustered 
     the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then miraculously, perhaps due 
     in some small measure to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he 
     evolved into a champion of civil rights. No better example 
     could underscore the power and accuracy of Martin's 
     observation.
       Bill wrote a marvelous autobiography, The Passion of My 
     Times: A Civil Rights Advocate's 50 Year Journey. As we know, 
     the title came from an Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quote: . . . 
     it is required of a man that he should share the passion and 
     action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have 
     lived. Bill Taylor, you lived that quote. And because you 
     did, America made progress.
       For everyone in this synagogue today and for countless 
     others who may not even know his name, Bill was a special 
     person who was always there. Bill Taylor was a mensch.
       Bill, we were so fortunate to have you as a friend.

                          ____________________