Arnold H. Taylor was born on November 9, 1929, in Regina, Northern Neck, Virginia, to Isaiah Taylor and Tina Rebecca Clayton Taylor. His schooling began in 1934 at Mount Olive Elementary School. He attended the Anna T. Jeanes School in Regina after the school closed in 1936. Taylor graduated with honors from Regina’s Julius Rosenwald High School in 1947. The following year, he enrolled at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia.
He pledged Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity during his junior year and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history in 1951. Taylor earned a Master of Arts in history from Howard University the following year, in 1952. John Hope Franklin directed his thesis on the “Antislavery movement in the District of Columbia.”
Taylor began his professional career as a history instructor at Benedict College in 1955. He received his Doctor of Philosophy in history from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, while at Benedict. He left Benedict in 1964 and taught history briefly at North Carolina College from 1964 to 1965, and then at Southern University in New Orleans until 1966.
In 1966, Taylor married Joyce Donaldson of Wilmington, North Carolina. They had one son, Arnold Bradford Taylor, who was born in Calcutta, India, in 1967, during his ten-month Fulbright Scholar stay at Jadavpur University, where he lectured in US history. Taylor also published the article “American Confrontation with Opium Traffic in the Philippines” in the Pacific Historical Review in 1967.
Taylor’s first work, American diplomacy and the narcotics trade, 1900-1939: A study in international humanitarian change, was published by Duke University Press in 1969. In 1974, he obtained a position as a history professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He began research for the book Travail and Triumph: Black Life and Culture in the South Since the Civil War, which was published in 1976 by Greenwood Press. This work describes the evolution of African American life patterns over the last three and a half centuries.
Taylor was one of the first academics to publicly oppose the Tuskegee experiment, which allowed 399 men to be deliberately infected with syphilis. He researched and wrote about the experiment, as well as how the American system of racial segregation supported the abuses that began with the program’s inception in 1932. On April 9, 1997, the Washington Post published his opinions in an op-ed essay. Taylor also contributed to the 1997 edition of The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage.
Arnold H. Taylor became chair of the Department of History at Howard University in 1998 and retired from teaching in 2000. He is currently residing in Washington, D.C.