The history of a historian will often give a sense of the why behind their work. When it came to Northwest history, few stood taller than Dr. Quintard Taylor, Jr. BlackPast.org announced his passing in a press release this week.
Dr. Quintard Taylor, Jr., who died on September 21 in Houston, Texas, is perhaps best known for creating the website BlackPast in 2004, a groundbreaking resource for African American and African history that has grown to draw millions of visits from over one hundred countries. As an academic, he was ahead of the times taking advantage of new technology in this way. Taylor also has served as president of the Western History Association, was a founding trustee of the Northwest African American Museum, and was a founding member of the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas.
I had the honor and pleasure of writing a number of entries for BlackPast, and in 2014, Dr. Taylor and I collaborated on the extended article “From Memphis & Mogadishu: The History of African Americans in King County, Washington, 1858-2014.” Aside from the work, over countless lunches at spots like Snappy Dragon, Uncle Lee’s, and Bombay Grill, our relationship grew to the point that I began calling him my “academic” dad. Over time, we would gather with my father, and they would swap stories of being Black academics in Pullman during the early 1970s.
Throughout the writing and research process of my own book, Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle, The Forging of a Black Community and the man himself served as invaluable resources helping provide proper context for the birth and emergence of local hip hop. In surveying the history of Black Seattle through his book, Taylor summed up the duality of race in the city brilliantly: “Indeed, Seattle’s apparent success and its underlying failure, in its race relations paradigm has been its meticulously crafted image which promoted the illusion of inclusion.”
A teacher, author, and historian, Taylor was born to Grace Taylor and Quintard Taylor Sr. on December 11, 1948, in Haywood County, Tennessee. Although his mother finished one year of college, his father only completed the second grade. The Taylors stressed the value of education to Quintard Jr. and his older sister Diane, and at age 16 he enrolled at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina. Not only was St. Augustine’s an attractive option because it was a predominantly Black Episcopalian school, it was also where Diane worked following her graduation from Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.
As the Civil Rights movement unfolded on American television in the 1960s, Taylor was drawn not only to the struggle for equality, but to the story of how these conditions came to be the reality of African Americans in the United States. At the suggestion of his mother, Taylor began to study history for the answers to these questions. While he had a thirst for this line of inquiry, it was not easy to access materials. Although a Black school, St. Augustine’s did not offer any courses on African American history until Taylor’s senior year.
Taylor left the South for the first time when he began attending the University of Minnesota as a graduate student. The program there—a combined Ph.D. that included studies in African American, African, and Black history in the Caribbean and Latin America—was called African Peoples. Following the completion of his master’s degree, Taylor taught at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, for four years before returning to Minnesota to complete his doctorate. After finishing his Ph.D. in 1977, he took a position teaching at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.
In 1987, Taylor accepted a Fulbright scholarship to teach a year at a research institution, the University of Lagos in Lagos, Nigeria. This new experience made a positive impression on Taylor, who landed at another major research institution, the University of Oregon, in 1990, where he became chair of the history department. In 1997, the University of Washington recruited Taylor for the prestigious Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History endowed chair, a position he held until becoming professor emeritus in 2018.
Quintard Taylor emerged as the preeminent scholar on African American history in the western United States. His books include Dr. Sam, Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend: The Autobiography of Samuel Eugene Kelly (2010); America I AM Black Facts: The Story of a People Through Timelines, 1601–2000 (Tavis Smiley Books, 2009); From Timbuktu to Katrina: Readings in African American History, Vol. 1&2 (Thomson Wadsworth, 2007); the Pulitzer Prize nominated In Search of the Racial Frontier: African American West 1528–1990 (W.W. Norton, 1998); The Forging of a Black Community: A History of Seattle’s Central District, 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (University of Washington Press, 1994). He has also edited African American Women Confront the West, 1600–2000 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003) and Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California (University of Washington Press, 2001), and was interviewed for Kevin Costner’s 2025 History Channel series “The West.”
Dr. Taylor is survived by three children: son Quintard III, daughter Jamila, and son William. After decades, he reconnected with Phylisa Agbor in 2017 while weathering Hurricane Harvey in Texas, the “storm that brought them together.” They were married in 2022.
The history of this historian makes clear the “why” behind legacy-defining achievements like The Forging of a Black Community and BlackPast. Rest in peace to a giant in the field, creator of the most extensive online source on worldwide Black history currently available, and my academic dad. Be looking for you at the Crossroads.
Dr. Abe is Professor of Humanities at Seattle Central College.
Daudi Abe
Source link