Reply #16: More here... [View All]

[Emit]

~snip~

Although Taylor is a liberal with Democratic roots and defended civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s, people who know her say she will follow the law -- not her politics -- in deciding the case. "She'll rule based on what the law requires, not on what people perceive her biases to be," Southfield lawyer Harold Pope III said last week. Pope is a former president of the National Bar Association, a prominent black lawyers' group.

Pope said Taylor, a former City of Detroit staff attorney who defended Mayor Coleman Young's efforts to integrate city government in the mid-1970s, ruled against Pope and Detroit in 1993, declaring unconstitutional a program that reserved municipal contracts for minority vendors. "She's not going to let anything stand in the way of a proper analysis of the law and the facts," Pope said.

~snip~

Taylor was born Anna Katherine Johnston in 1932 in Washington, D.C. Her father was treasurer of Howard University. Her mother was a homemaker and a business teacher. After the ninth grade, Taylor's parents sent her to Northfield School for Girls in East Northfield, Mass. -- one of the few prep schools that accepted black students -- to groom her for a career.

~snip~

Unable to get a job as a lawyer at New York or Washington, D.C., law firms -- a near impossibility for black people, especially women, in the 1950s -- Taylor turned to the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of Labor. She became a lawyer there with the help of J. Ernest Wilkins, then assistant secretary of labor and the first black person appointed to a subcabinet post. He also was a friend of her father's.

"I'd be unemployed today if it hadn't been for that man," Taylor said in a 1984 interview with the Michigan Bar Journal.

~snip~

In 1964, five months after the birth of the first of her two children, Taylor went to Mississippi to defend civil-rights workers who were jailed for registering black people to vote. The day Taylor arrived, three workers -- James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner -- disappeared near Philadelphia, Miss. Taylor, her brother, another law student and Detroit lawyer George Crockett Jr., who eventually became a Michigan congressman, drove to the Neshoba County Courthouse to inquire about the missing men.

Sheriff Lawrence Rainey Jr., who was implicated and later acquitted in the men's deaths, was less than helpful, Taylor recalled. As Taylor and the group walked back to their car, they were menaced by a crowd of angry white people who shouted racial slurs at them. "We were afraid we were going to be killed," Taylor said.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060807/NEWS05/608070381/1001/NEWS