For every brave pioneer who crossed the color line in full glare of the public eye—Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks—there are thousands who inched African Americans closer to equal rights beyond the limelight. One of those overlooked by history is NAACP attorney Willard L. Brown, the first African American judge in West Virginia.

From 1950 until 1966, Brown (LAW’35,’36) was president of the state’s Charleston NAACP. He fought school districts that refused to desegregate, convinced 41 downtown restaurants to open their doors to blacks, and took to the streets in nonviolent protest. During those peaceful demonstrations, Brown would often be joined by his family, including his young niece, Andrea L. Taylor. When Brown marched on Washington in August 1963 to share one man’s dream of equality, Taylor was there. When Brown picketed segregationist and Alabama Governor George Wallace at the Greenbrier Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, Taylor was there.

Thanks to trailblazers like Brown, Taylor (’68) didn’t spend a day in a segregated school. She moved from Boston to West Virginia in 1956, two years after the state desegregated its schools. But, as a person of color, she says, issues of equality and social justice, of access to human rights, have always been present. “The dynamic has changed over a lifetime,” she says, but those concerns are “always there and I suspect always will be there.”

Now the head of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, Taylor is charged with preserving the struggles of everyday heroes like her uncle and helping future generations carry the fight forward.

The Epicenter of Change

In 1963, Birmingham was the tumultuous center of the civil rights movement. It was in Birmingham that Ku Klux Klan members bombed a church and killed four young girls, that Eugene “Bull” Connor set police dogs on children protesting peacefully, that Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59) was arrested and penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” From her office window, Taylor can see the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the young girls were murdered, and Kelly Ingram Park, where snarling dogs lunged at high school kids.

The 58,000-square-foot Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, describes itself as a cultural and educational research center. It has museum-style displays showing the inequities of segregation and the growth of the civil rights movement—“white” and “colored” drinking fountains, a burned-out bus, the story of Birmingham’s first African American mayor—and an extensive outreach effort, offering free education programs, K–12 lesson plans and monthly classes for parents. Taylor says the institute reaches about 150,000 people every year through visits and its community programs. Her job is to help the institute rise from a local treasure to a national, even international, force.

A former director at Microsoft and the Media Fund at the Ford Foundation, vice president at the Education Development Center and president of the Benton Foundation, Taylor became the institute’s president and CEO in September 2015—just the third since its opening in 1992.

As a kid, Taylor spent a lot of time in museums. When she was 11, she spent an entire summer touring Europe’s cultural gems with her mother—Della Hardman (GRS’45), a professor of art—who was preparing to teach art of Western civilization at Western Virginia State College and wanted to see as much of it as she could.

“I developed a habit from a very early age of whenever I went to a new community—anywhere, under any circumstance—I made sure I visited its museums,” says Taylor, a BU trustee and one of nine in her family to attend the University.

Working at Microsoft fueled her passion for museums and cultural institutions. As director of citizenship and public affairs for North America, Taylor helped run community education programs and employee community efforts, while leveraging the tech giant’s expertise—and financial muscle—to support a range of nonprofits. She collaborated with the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York and science museums in Chicago and Boston; she was also part of the foundational discussions for the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

As a professional philanthropist, Taylor says, she gave out grants to help museums stay relevant in the modern age, allowing them to “incorporate technology into their exhibitions and programs so they could extend the reach of their work and the information they were providing.”

It’s one of the reasons she was hired in Birmingham—despite never having worked for a museum before.

“They were looking for someone who could help take the institute to another level,” says Taylor, who began her career as a reporter at the Boston Globe and founded a public relations firm in the 1980s.

Among her goals at the institute, she told Birmingham Magazine shortly after her appointment, are increasing visitor numbers by 100,000 annually, lifting the number of paid members from 400 to 25,000, hosting more high-profile events, refreshing galleries and updating the technology powering the visitor experience.

“Getting there won’t be easy,” the magazine said. “She oversees the museum’s operations, but her challenge is much greater than that. She is now the very public face of the institute and indeed the face of the history of a city that is often forced to remember its violent and hateful past as it strives to move beyond it.”

An American Story

In January 2017, Taylor’s efforts received a major boost from outgoing President Barack Obama. Just weeks before leaving office, he signed a proclamation establishing the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument, a four-block corridor encompassing the institute and seven other historically important sites. Once the new national park is fully operational—it currently offers limited services, according to the National Park Service—it should help the city and the institute pull in more visitors.

Taylor also sees the proclamation as an important milestone in cementing the history of the civil rights movement as part of the nation’s story.

“It’s not just an African American history, it’s an American history,” she says. Too often, black history is not woven into textbooks, Taylor says, but sidelined into Black History Month, then forgotten for another year.

“This history represents a part of all Americans and we need to come to grips with that, we need to talk about it, we need to understand it, we need to know about it and we need to use it as part of the guiding principles as we try to form a more perfect union in this country; diversity and inclusion are to be valued and respected, acknowledged.”

In her drive for more visitors, Taylor is keenly focused on getting more kids through the door. Many of the guides and docents at the institute are young people from its Legacy Youth Leadership Program, which features weekly workshops that teach high schoolers about African American history, and promote self-esteem, character and community involvement. Local schoolchildren have free access to the galleries.

“One of the lessons of the history here in Birmingham is that the real change agents that we continue to celebrate are the young people,” says Taylor. It was the youth—often disobeying parents rightly fearful of reprisals—who were hosed down by Bull Connor’s brutal police officers. Hundreds of schoolchildren were arrested in the so-called Children’s Crusade, a series of May 1963 marches in Birmingham. “It turned out to be this story that just shook the world and changed the direction and course of the civil rights movement.”

During her time at Microsoft, Taylor was invigorated by her younger colleagues and she wants the institute to encourage more intergenerational cooperation.

“While I was at Microsoft, I really had an opportunity to see the power of young people and the change they were bringing, and I also had an opportunity to understand that you still need to have older adults around and that together, there is much we can accomplish,” she says. “The future of these institutions, like the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, is absolutely dependent on a buy-in and engagement with young people, because if they don’t buy into it, it will die, it will not be relevant in the present.”

Today, Taylor is raising the institute’s profile by positioning it as an educating voice on contemporary civil rights issues. On the first anniversary of the Pulse shooting in Florida—a gunman killed 49 in the gay nightclub in June 2016—an expert from the institute talked to the Orlando Sentinel about how a city’s residents can move forward together after an abhorrent event. Taylor also highlights a recent exhibition that tackled immigration from Latin America: “It was an opportunity,” she says, “for literally thousands of people to broaden and deepen their understanding of the history of immigration from Latin America and how much that has contributed to the common good, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there.”

In 2016, the institute held a conference with the local FBI office to discuss race and law enforcement. The guest speaker was then FBI Director James Comey, who Taylor says apologized for the lackluster efforts of the bureau during the civil rights era.

“Our role is to make the connections between history and the present, so hopefully we will not repeat some of the mistakes and tragedies of the past,” says Taylor. “We try to present the history in a way that allows people to understand it and absorb it, grasp the reality of it, and then to fast-forward to the present to be certain that the practices and the policies and the way that we operate as communities will never allow anything like this to happen again.”

During a time when many feel the United States is repeating past mistakes on issues of equality, it’s an important task. At a Birmingham rally for love and justice in July 2016—as the nation roiled after the police shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana—Taylor said America was “perhaps more divided than at any time in our recent history.”

She told the crowd of 100 or so peaceful protestors about being a great-granddaughter of slaves and a mother and grandmother of African American men, about how “the assault on African American and other communities of color is unacceptable and must be stopped. Technology is helping to bring this truth to light and it is no longer possible to crush and cover up injustice.”

She also used the history of Birmingham to show that communities could transition from revolution to reconciliation.

“This is not our nation’s finest hour. We must not despair; rather, we must seek ways to come together and to demand equal justice and due process under the law. We must resist being discouraged, and pursue peaceful means of transforming and changing our society to be all it can be.”

It’s nearly 55 years since Taylor and her uncle stood on the National Mall and heard King’s dream of black and white children in Alabama joining hands as sisters and brothers. In what she’s called the “encore phase” of her career, Taylor is doing what she can to ensure that all Alabamans, all Americans, can hear freedom ring.