William Taylor is the chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. A lawyer, teacher, and writer in the fields of civil rights and education, he practices law in Washington, DC, specializing in litigation and other forms of advocacy on behalf of low income and minority children.

He began his legal career in 1954 as an attorney on the staff of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In the 1960s, he served as general counsel and later as staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, where he directed major investigations and research studies that contributed to the civil rights laws enacted in the 1960s. In 1970, Taylor founded the Center for National Policy review, a civil rights research and advocacy organization funded by private foundations that he directed for sixteen years.

In the courtroom, Taylor has been lead counsel for black children in several major school desegregation cases, including St. Louis, where he secured the largest voluntary metropolitan school desegregation plan in the nation. On the legislative front, Taylor has long been a leader of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and currently serves as its vice chairman. Working with the Leadership Conference in 1982, he played a major role in bringing about the extension and strengthening of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Taylor was a leader in the coalition of civil rights organizations that successfully blocked the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987. He helped lead successful efforts to enact the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act. Taylor was a founder and now serves as the chair of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights. For the Citizens’ Commission, he has served as co-editor of a series of reports documenting the failures of civil rights enforcement since the 1980s and making recommendations for change.

For the last several years, Taylor has worked on education reform legislation to advance opportunity for poor and minority children.

Taylor has taught civil rights and education law at Catholic University Law School and at Stanford Law School. He now teaches education law as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law School. He has written widely about public law and policy issues for legal and education journals, magazines, and newspapers, and is the author of the book Hanging Together: Equality in an Urban Nation (1971). Taylor’s memoirs, The Passion of My Times: An Advocate's Fifty-Year Journey in the Civil Rights Movement, was published by Carroll and Graf in 2004. Among the honors he has received is the first Thurgood Marshall award conferred by the District of Columbia Bar in 1993.

Taylor is a graduate of Brooklyn College and the Yale Law School.