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FEBRUARY 2006

The Passion Of My Times:
An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey
In The Civil Rights Movement 

Reviewed By Merri Rosenberg

The Passion Of My Times: An Advocate’s Fifty-Year Journey In The Civil Rights Movement
by William L. Taylor
Published by Carroll & Graf, New York, (2004) 251 pp.

Although I was barely in elementary school during the Freedom Summer of 1964, I remember sitting in my late  parents’ living room in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, listening to several of their school teacher friends discuss their plans to register black voters in the South during their summer vacation. I had little concept of civil rights, or what this effort represented–only that it was something very, very serious that had my parents worried about their friends’ safety.

42 years later, those memories came flooding back as I read William L. Taylor’s utterly compelling and engrossing memoir of his involvement as a white, Jewish man from Brooklyn, as an advocate in the civil rights movement. He takes us from his early, heady days as part of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where Thurgood Marshall was the chief counsel, to his appointment as general counsel and staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, to his later work maintaining civil rights advances as a founder of the Center for National Policy Review at Catholic University Law School in Washington. Some of his causes have included promoting affirmative action policies, helping  black school children during the process of desegregation in major educational systems, challenging fiscal inequity in public school funding, and now teaching, writing and lecturing as  an education law adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law School.

What my own children consider simply part of a history lesson in a social studies class, where they’ve dutifully read excerpts from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches, or discussed the political efforts that helped achieve the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, becomes strikingly vivid in Taylor’s narrative.

Taylor’s powerful description of visiting Natchez, Mississippi, where he and a colleague from the Commission on Civil Rights were menaced by local whites, is a reminder that the passage of the Civil Rights act was by no means a certainty, and that the threats to its supporters were real. He mentions one Justice department investigator who blockaded the door to his motel room when he was in Mississippi—and the harrowing experiences of local black residents, who shared their stories of being beaten and pistol-whipped by white supremacists, for having had the courage to register other blacks to vote. It’s chilling, and sobering, and shameful.

It’s not surprising that Taylor is outraged and appalled by the recent election irregularities, most notably during the 2000 Presidential election in Florida. As Taylor writes, “Minority voters are still shortchanged by inferior voting equipment and ill-staffed polling places...And, of course, real enfranchisement for people of color will not be fully realized until their economic conditions and educational opportunities improve.”

A graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, Taylor believes in law as an instrument of justice that can redress historic wrongs and help achieve true equality in our society. He writes, “there are many battles still to be fought, but experience suggests that they are worth fighting and that they can be won.”

It’s inspiring that after more than 50 years as an advocate for civil rights, Taylor still has that “fire in the belly,” and is still fighting for liberal causes, and social justice.#

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