[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.

[4] He died at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 4, 1954, at the age of 60.

[6] His second wife was Catherine Brummell Buchanan Taylor; they married on September 9, 1943, and had five children.

[8] 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.