Joe Gray Taylor

​ Joe Gray Taylor (February 14, 1920 – December 8, 1987)^[1] was a historian of the American South who published fifteen essays and eight books, including Louisiana: a Bicentennial History (1976). A World War II hero, Taylor was affiliated for most of his career with McNeese State University in Lake Charles in southwestern Louisiana.

Taylor was born in Tipton County, located north of Memphis, Tennessee, to Bassil Gray Taylor, who earned the family livelihood as a farmer and carpenter, and the former Lennie Fee Shinault. He was educated in public schools and attended from 1937 to 1939 Memphis State University, then Memphis State College. He taught in a one-room school in Tennessee from 1939 until 1941.​^[2][3]

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Taylor joined the United States Air Force (then the Army Air Corps). He flew seventy missions as bombardier-navigator with the Twelfth Bomb Group in the China-Burma theater. He attained the rank offirst lieutenant and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and three battle stars.​^[2]

On his discharge from the armed forces in 1945, Taylor married the former Helen Eva Friday (born 1923), the daughter of an attorney from the small town of North, South Carolina, near Orangeburg. The couple had three children, Joe, Jr. (born 1952), Harriette Eva (born 1955) and Edward Coleman Taylor (born 1959). They remained married until Taylor's death.^[2] ​

After the war, Taylor obtained his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Memphis State in 1947 and 1948, respectively. He thereafter obtained the Ph.D. degree in history from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1951. From 1950 to 1953, Taylor taught at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux in Lafourche Parish, then known as Thibodaux Junior College. He then fulfilled a four-year commitment as the historian at the Air Force Research Studies Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base near the capital city of Montgomery, Alabama.​^[2]

Taylor returned to teaching at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond for the 1957-1958 term. Then he returned to Nicholls State from 1958 to 1963 before he was named professor at McNeese, a position that he held until his death twenty-four years later.​ At McNeese, Taylor chaired the history department from 1968 to 1983. He then was named to head the College of Liberal Arts, a post that he filled from 1983 until his death.​^[2] ​

Books and articles

Taylor authored five monographs and four essays on Air Force history. Otherwise, he concentrated on Louisiana and the South. His works included Negro Slavery in Louisiana (1963) and Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863-1887 (1974), which won the L. Kemper Williams Prize and the Louisiana Literary Award. A later work was his social history on southern hospitality entitled Eating, Drinking, and Visiting in the South (1982). Taylor was, along with LSU professor Edwin Adams Davis (1904-1994) and Raleigh A. Suarez, one of the coauthors of Louisiana: The Pelican State, a middle school textbook which traces the development of Louisiana from its earliest times to the 1980s.^[4]

Taylor authored book reviews in twenty historical journals and thirty reviews in Louisiana History alone. One of Taylor's acclaimed reviews was "The Many Interests of T. Harry Williams" in the March 1984 edition of Reviews in American History. Williams, the author of a sympathetic biography of Huey Pierce Long, Jr., was the preeminent historian at LSU prior to his death in 1979.​ ​

Associations

In 1967, Taylor was elected president of the Lafayette-based Louisiana Historical Association. In 1979, he received the McNeese State University "Distinguished Teaching Award." He received the "Award of Merit" from the American Association for State and Local History in 1984. He was a member of the executive council of the Southern Historical Associatio] for the last two years of his life. He was named Louisiana "Humanist of the Year" in 1986. His associations also included Phi Kappa Ph, Phi Alpha Theta, the American Historical Association, and the Organization of American Historians. He was an elder in the Presbyterian Church.​^[5] ​

Taylor died in Lake Charles. He is interred at Robinson Cemetery near the Gainesville community in Tipton County, Tennessee.^[5] Taylor's papers are at McNeese's Lether Frazar Library.​

• "In Memoriam: Joe Gray Taylor," North Louisiana History, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp. 44–46 (based in Shreveport)​.

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