William L. Taylor dies at 78; leading civil rights advocate

William L. Taylor didn’t necessarily look the part of a leading civil rights advocate, a matter he addressed in his memoir under the heading “A White Guy Like Me,” as in: “What leads a white guy like me to spend his life working on behalf of black people?”

Growing up Jewish in Brooklyn while the Holocaust raged in Europe helped shape his future, he wrote. Another early lesson in civil rights came from following the “career and courage” of Jackie Robinson as he broke major league baseball’s color line in 1947.

For more than 50 years, Taylor played a major role in drafting and defending civil rights legislation. One career highlight came early: He helped craft the 1958 Supreme Court brief that resulted in Little Rock., Ark., schools being forced to maintain desegregation.

Taylor died Monday at a Bethesda, Md., hospital of complications from a fall, said Rabbi Ethan Seidel of Tifereth Israel Congregation, which Taylor attended in Washington. He was 78.

“His contributions to the desegregation of our nation’s education system were unparalleled and invaluable,” Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, called Taylor “a pioneer in education” and a “true hero” whose “relentless pursuit of equality was evident in everything he did.”

Graduating from Yale Law School in 1954, one month after the Supreme Court first ordered the desegregation of schools in Brown vs. Board of Education, was “fortuitous,” Taylor once said. The landmark decision moved him to pursue civil rights work.

He began his career as an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York, working with Thurgood Marshall, who would become the first black Supreme Court justice.

They knew they were making history, Taylor later said, with the Arkansas case. The local school board had suspended integration at a Little Rock high school after widespread violence and civil disorder.

“At issue was the rule of the law.... Would we permit, even temporarily, mob rule?” Taylor recalled in a 1999 interview. “The court ruled unanimously in our favor,” making it clear that desegregation was the law of the land.

During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and directed research that contributed to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

After leading the commission from 1965 to 1968, he taught civil rights law for 15 years at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he founded the Center for National Policy Review, a civil rights research and advocacy organization.

In the 1980s, Taylor played a key role as vice chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, working on national legislative campaigns that strengthened major civil rights laws. He also served as chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a watchdog group he helped found in 1982.

After entering private practice in 1986, he continued to advocate for equality in education. One of his biggest cases resulted in the establishment in St. Louis of the largest metropolitan school desegregation plan.

The son of immigrants from Lithuania, William Lewis Taylor was born in 1931 in Brooklyn. His father was a civil engineer.

In first grade, he was taunted as a “Christ-killer” by Italian boys in the neighborhood, he recalled in his 2004 memoir, “The Passion of My Times.”

After winning $7,000 on the TV game show “Tic Tac Dough” in the 1950s, he testified before the grand jury when the quiz-show scandal broke and learned that he had won more money than anyone else who had played honestly, Taylor wrote in his memoir.

He earned a bachelor’s degree at Brooklyn College in 1952 and had what he called “a character-building experience” when the administration shut down the campus paper, which was criticized as too independent.

When the college paid tribute to him in 2001, Taylor said, “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.”

Taylor’s wife of 43 years, the former Harriett Rosen, who was a Superior Court judge in Washington, died in 1997 at the age of 65.

His survivors include his three children, Lauren, Debbie and David.

valerie.nelson@latimes.com