Alrutheus Ambush Taylor | |
---|---|
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Born | November 22, 1893 |
Died | June 4, 1954 | (aged 60)
Spouses | Harriet Ethel Wilson
(
m. 1919; died 1941)Catherine Brummell Buchanan Taylor
(
m. 1943) |
Academic background | |
Education | University of Michigan ( BA) Harvard University ( MA, PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | American History |
Sub-discipline | Reconstruction history |
Alrutheus Ambush Taylor (1893–1954) was a historian from Washington D.C. He was a specialist in the history of blacks and segregation, especially during the Reconstruction Era. [1] The Crisis cited him as a "painstaking scholar and authority on Negro history". [2] An African-American, he taught at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, at the West Virginia Collegiate Institute in West Virginia, and at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Following a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, Taylor began researching the role of African Americans in the South during Reconstruction. [3] He authored The Negro in South Carolina During the Reconstruction in 1924, The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia in 1926, and The Negro in Tennessee, 1865-1880 in 1941. [4]
He died at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4, 1954, at the age of 60. [5] [6]
Taylor was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of Lewis and Lucy Johnson Taylor's nine children. [7] He enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1910 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics in 1916. Taylor was later rejected from the university's history graduate program by Ulrich B. Phillips, who cited Taylor's undergraduate focus in mathematics. [1] Carter G. Woodson financed Taylor's Master of Arts at Harvard University, where he completed his thesis entitled "The Social Conditions and Treatment of Negroes in South Carolina, 1865-1880" in 1923. [7] Taylor would finish his PhD at Harvard in 1935. [5]
His earliest two published books, The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction in 1924, and The Negro in the Reconstruction of Virginia, challenged the Dunning School of Reconstruction historiography. [5]