Back to Current Events | Nick Toloudis | Paul and Nettie Becker

Clarence Taylor

Clarence Taylor

Clarence Taylor provided our Dreamers and Fighters HISTORY page with an overview of the NYC Teachers Union, which will give you a preview of his forthcoming Reds On the Blackboard. He has lectured widely on the subject of teacher unionism and the TU and this book will feature a political view of the Union.

Clarence Taylor joined the Baruch College faculty in 2004. Prior to his appointment at Baruch, Professor Taylor spent many years teaching in the New York public school system.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Clarence attended the public schools of East New York and Canarsie. He received his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College and his M.A. from New York University. Shortly after graduation from NYU, Taylor began teaching in the New York City public school system as a special education teacher. For seven years, he worked at Junior High School 278 in Marine Park, Brooklyn, with students who were classified as emotionally disturbed, one of the most challenging student populations in the system. In 1984 Taylor left JHS 278 and became a social studies teacher at James Madison High School in Brooklyn. While teaching there, he pursued his doctorate in history at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

Taylor's Commitment to Civil Rights

In 1991, Clarence received his Ph.D. in American history and began teaching at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. He reworked his dissertation into a book, The Black Churches of Brooklyn from the 19th Century to the Civil Rights Era, published by Columbia University Press in 1994. In 1996, Clarence became a member of the History Department and the African-New World Studies Program at Florida International University.

His second book, Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools was published by Columbia University Press in 1997, and in 2002, his book Black Religious Intellectuals: The Fight for Equality from Jim Crow to the 21st Century was published by Routledge.

Clarence is also co-editor of Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (New York University Press, 2000) which won the Gustavus Myers Prize in 2001.