“We live in days of Great Change, a shuffling of status and symbols,” Dr. Clyde Taylor wrote in 1973. “Yeats’ cry ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ is good news in the Third World; a ferment rises in the young bloods in the bush. And stepping out of the shelter of their place in the shadows of American exceptionalist rationalizations.”
Taylor, an example of the activist scholars of his day, composed this as part of an essay about “Black Consciousness in the Vietnam Years,” reflective of his stance against the Vietnam War. That strong voice of the Black liberation movement took a final breath on January 24. He was 92 and died in Los Angeles. According to his daughter, Rahdi Taylor, the cause of his death was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Born Clyde Russell Taylor on July 3, 1931, in Boston, he was the youngest of eight children of his parents, Frank and E. Alice (Tyson) Taylor. His father was a member of the legendary Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and his mother was an entrepreneur who was active with the NAACP’s Boston chapter.
Not much is known of Taylor’s formative years, although we do know that he was a graduate of English High School and later Howard University, where he received his B.A. degree in 1953 and six years later, his master’s in the same subject. It was there that he met several Black literary and political activists, including Toni Morrison and Amiri Baraka.
After graduation from Howard, Taylor enlisted in the Air Force as an intelligence officer and left service as a first lieutenant; he was honorably discharged with a National Defense Service Medal. At Wayne State University in Detroit, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on the works of William Blake and the ideology of art. In 1960, he married JoAnn Spencer and they had two daughters, Rahdi and Shelley Zinzi Taylor. They divorced in 1970.
Two years later, Taylor moved to San Francisco and married Martella Wilson. Together, they founded the African Film Society. By the mid-’90s, the marriage had dissolved. Taylor moved to New York City and began teaching at New York University.
Throughout these turbulent times, Taylor was on the ramparts of the Black studies movement, particularly at UCLA, with a critical role in advancing revolutionary cinema, most notably as a presenter and commentator: “The making of ‘O Povo Organizado’ [‘The People Organized’] in Mozambique by Bob Van Lierop, an African American, or of ‘Sambizanga,’ about Angola by Guadoupian Sara Maldoror, or the Ethiopian Haile Gerima’s ‘Bush Mama,’ set in Los Angeles, or Pontecorvo’s ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ or the several Latin American and African films created by Cubans, or the many Third World films made by Europeans and white Americans––all suggest the cross-fertilizations of an embryonic transnational Third World cinema movement.” Taylor figured prominently in this development.
A book certainly could have been forged from Taylor’s extensive study of cinema, and one was published: “The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract––Film and Literature in 1988.”
In one of his last essays, Taylor expounded on the differences between Africa and Hollywood: “Africa stands today (2021) at the other end of the spectrum from Hollywood. If Americans view cinema from the center of profitable, monopolistic production and distribution, Africa is a laboratory for the study of film’s relation to society from the vantage point of the exploited.”
Right down to the end of his extraordinary life, Clyde Taylor possessed a keen analysis and passionate commitment to the world of cinema and its prospects here and abroad.