Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond

How could a man who never saw the inside of a library until he was in college create what's considered to be the largest online collection of global Black history?

Maybe it had something to do with the story Dr. Quintard Taylor's father told him when he was a young boy.

“He said why is it that when the lion and the man fight, the lion always wins?” Taylor recalled being asked by his father — a man who only had a second-grade education. “Because the lion has never learned to write.”

It was a profound tale with a lesson that launched Taylor’s future as an archivist. Whoever controls history, controls the story.

“He told me that story three times and most recently last month,” said Doug Bender, board president of BlackPast.org, which Taylor created more than 20 years ago.

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Taylor died Sept. 21 after devoting his life to teaching history and educating people across the globe about Black history, particularly the history of the American West.

He was born in 1948 in segregated Brownsville, Tennessee, to a family of sharecroppers.

After earning his B.A. in history at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, Taylor pursued an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota.

Taylor said he was inspired to focus on the “Black West” by one of his students, Billy R. Flowers, early in his teaching career when he was an assistant professor at Washington State University.

“He said, ‘Why do you never discuss the Black West?’” Taylor recalled during a speech at Seattle Public Library in 2022.

The question led Taylor to team up with Flowers to explore the role of African Americans in the American West.

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“We didn’t go to Seattle. We didn’t go to Portland. We went to places like Moscow and Potlatch in Idaho, and Clarkston in Washington,” Taylor said. “And I thought, ‘If Black history was close to WSU, it must be everywhere,’ and I found that it was throughout the Northwest.”

That research spawned a lifetime of research and publications, including books such as, “In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West 1528-1990,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize..

In 2004, Taylor informally began BlackPast.org as an extension of his faculty website at the University of Washington in Seattle where he was the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History.

That same year, his daughter, state Rep. Jamila Taylor (D-Federal Way), redesigned the website to make it more accessible and easier to navigate.

Over the years, BlackPast.org has grown exponentially. In 2023, the site had 6.5 million visitors and more than 1,000 contributors that include historians and academics from six continents who have written 7,200 entries.

Bender said Taylor had a way of inspiring people to pursue their passions fully, in part because of his own commitment to expanding and deepening accounts of Black history in America.

“He pricked your soul, just being an inspiration to lean in, creating that lasting legacy that will continue to inspire and guide future generations,” Bender said.

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Over the course of his life, Taylor lectured around the world, including places as far away as Siberia.

Despite these international commitments, he took time in Seattle to volunteer for organizations such as the Breakfast Group, dedicated to mentoring young Black men. He also was a founding trustee of the Northwest African American Museum.

Bender said he spoke with Taylor not long before he died in Houston, Texas, at the age of 76.

“I’m grateful that he was my brother,” Bender said. “I believe many of us have yet to appreciate the full impact of his legacy.”