The Passion of My Times: An Advocate's Fifty-Year Journey Through the Civil Rights Revolution

Shortly after his 1954 graduation from Yale Law School, Taylor found his calling: first as an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, later as staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1965–1968) and founder of the Center for National Policy Review. His lucid memoir offers an up-close look at the nuts-and-bolts work (collecting data, pushing legislation, securing effective administration of law and policy) behind major moments in the Civil Rights movement and its aftermath. Selma is here, but Senate hearings are more central, as Taylor describes being involved "in big court cases, in major legislative efforts, in planning civil rights strategy, and in persuading people with power or influence to do the right thing." Although there are lively anecdotal touches (Senator Orrin Hatch as "a peculiar amalgam of... Uriah Heep and Ebenezer Scrooge"; U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach provoked into calling Taylor a "cocksucker"), the tone is matter-of-fact. What makes Taylor's book of special value, particularly to historians of the era, is that Taylor neither dramatizes nor romanticizes this work ("We did not establish the conditions that made enactment of the laws possible"), but honors everyone working for change. The movement needed Taylors as well as Kings. Agent, Milly Marmur. (Nov.)