Quintard Taylor
Quintard Taylor is an historian, author, and website director. From July 1, 1998, until June 30, 2018, Taylor was the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle and as such he held the oldest endowed chair at the University. He is now retired and holds the title, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor Emeritus.
Taylor is the author of The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era, described in 2020 as one of the 10 most influential books published by the University of Washington Press in the past Century, and In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the America West, 1528-1990, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History, His Dr. Sam: Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend, An Autobiography, which Taylor co-authored with the late university administrator and career army officer, was released in the summer of 2010.
Taylor is also the author of over fifty articles. His work on African American Western History, African American, African, Afro-Brazilian, and comparative ethnic history has appeared in the Western Historical Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, Oregon Historical Quarterly, Journal of Negro History, Arizona and the West, the Western Journal of Black Studies, and the Journal of Ethnic Studies. He is also editor of the Race and Culture in the West Series for the University of Oklahoma Press. Twelve titles have appeared in the series since its launch in 2007. A link to the complete list of books in the series appears below.
On February 1, 2007, Taylor and other volunteers created an online website resource center for African American history called BlackPast.org (www.blackpast.org). The center houses nearly 8,000 pages of information and features contributions by nearly 1,000 academic, independent, and student historians from six continents. It is now the largest reference center of its type on the Internet. In 2020, 6.1 million people from more than 190 nations visited the website and so far this year nearly 5 million have used it. Since its February 2007 launch, more than 44 million people have accessed information from the pages of BlackPast.org.
In October 2011, Taylor completed his one-year term as the 50th President of the Western History Association (WHA). Taylor has taught at universities in Washington, Oregon, California, and Nigeria over his 47-year career in higher education. In April 2017 Taylor received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pacific Northwest Historians’ Guild and in September 2017 he received the Robert Gray Medal for his Lifetime Contribution to Pacific Northwest History from the Washington State Historical Society. On March 28, 2019, he received the Alpha Civic Award from Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity at its 71st Western Regional Convention in Bellevue, Washington.
For additional information please see the following websites,
Race and Culture in the West Series for the University of Oklahoma Press