Meet the President, 2009 - 2011
James Lance Taylor
Ph.D.: University of Southern California (USC)
Fields: Black political history, Black political ideologies, political leadership, religion and politics, social movements and punishment
James Lance Taylor is a native of Long Island, New York and was active in the community there in opposition to the infiltration of “crack” cocaine into the community in the early 1980s. He subsequently moved to California and attended Pepperdine University where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religious Studies. He was the University's first African American commencement speaker (1987) and taught there from 1991-1997. Taylor subsequently attended the University of Southern California (USC) where he earned a Master of Arts in Political Science with distinction, won a Teaching Award, and a Ph.D. in Political Science with distinction (1999). The dissertation was entitled, “Black Politics in Transition: From Protest to Politics to Political Neutrality?” with Professor Michael B. Preston as Chair.
Taylor is currently an Associate Professor of Politics at the (Jesuit) University of San Francisco.His teaching and research interests are in Black political history, Black political ideologies, political leadership, religion and politics, social movements and punishment. Taylor also serves as advisor to the Black Student Union and teaches in the African American and Legal Studies minor programs. He is active in San Francisco's political community having written part of the Human Right's Commissions 2002 report, “The Effects of Violence on San Francisco's Communities and Neighborhoods of Color.” In the report: Violence in Our City: Research and Recommendations to Empower our Community,” and as a task force member for San Francisco Supervisor Sophie Maxwell's (10th District) sponsored legislation “Slavery Era Disclosure Ordinance.”
He has publications on Robert Alexander Young and Betty Shabazz, with Oxford University Press and the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for African American Research at Harvard University (2008). Other publications assess Benjamin Chavis (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), Martin Luther King, Jr. ( ABC-CLIO, 2007), and Black religion and politics (Baylor University, 2007). His book, tentatively titled: Sons of Thunder: Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan in the post-Civil Rights Era, is on contract with Lynne Reinner Publishing. This study is a comparative analysis of two of the twentieth century's most notable and influential African American political elites and their relevance to post-civil rights expressions of Black Nationalism. Analysis explores and delineates the familial, ideological, religious, organizational, and contextual linkages between them and attempts to explain why they emerge as two of the most important leadership representations for younger African Americans in the 1980s and 1990s.
Taylor has served NCOBPS as a Local Arrangements Committee member, as a Section Chair, Executive Council member, Membership Initiative committee member, and 2005 Co-Program Chair.
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