Alrutheus Ambush Taylor
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Alrutheus Ambush Taylor | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 22, 1893 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | June 4, 1954 (aged 60) Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Spouses | Harriet Ethel Wilson
(m. 1919; died 1941)Catherine Brummell Buchanan
(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]
Taylor was born in Washington, D.C., the youngest of Lewis and Lucy Johnson Taylor's nine children.[5] 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.[5] Taylor would finish his PhD at Harvard in 1935.[6]
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.[6]
