Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. After the Little Rock, Arkansas school board decided to end a desegregation program in 1958, Taylor wrote a brief that convinced the court to require the continued integration of its schools. He served as general counsel, and later as staff director, at the United States Commission on Civil Rights during the 1960s, where his research helped lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. There he helped formulate a voluntary desegregation plan in the 1980s for the St. Louis, Missouri school system. With United States District Court Judge William L. Hungate threatening to impose a mandate to combine the St. Louis and St. Louis County public school systems, Taylor was able to avert the threat by offering an interdistrict transfer program that the city and county districts agreed to voluntarily. As vice chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights starting in 1982, Taylor helped revise civil rights legislation. He headed a team of lawyers that wrote a 75-page report early in the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, criticizing the administration's interpretations of civil rights law. He was credited with developing the strategy by which liberal organizations recruited law professors to testify against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the United States Supreme Court, which ultimately failed in the United States Senate. Ralph Neas, who chaired the Block Bork coalition recounted how Taylor's team "examined every article, every speech, every decision, every statement that Robert Bork ever made", providing the supporting material that blocked Bork's path to nomination. He helped draft the 2002 legislation for the No Child Left Behind Act, with the aim of increasing the quality of education by monitoring student performance on standardized tests. Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings described Taylor as "a huge champion for closing the achievement gap, for accountability". Personal and family A resident of Washington, D.C., Taylor died at age 78 on June 28, 2010, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland due to fluid in his lungs, the result of a head injury he suffered in an accidental fall one month before his death. He was survived by a son, two daughters and three grandchildren. In 1954, he married Harriett Elaine Rosen, who died in 1997. Taylor's personal papers and archives were given to the Library of Congress and