Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond

Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond Angela King October 03, 2025 / 1:17 pm

How could a man who never saw the inside of a library until he was in college create what's considered to be the largest online collection of global Black history?

Maybe it had something to do with the story Dr. Quintard Taylor's father told him when he was a young boy.

“He said why is it that when the lion and the man fight, the lion always wins?” Taylor recalled being asked by his father — a man who only had a second-grade education. “Because the lion has never learned to write.”

It was a profound tale with a lesson that launched Taylor’s future as an archivist. Whoever controls history, controls the story.

“He told me that story three times and most recently last month,