Richard K. Taylor, an Elkins Park native, world peace activist, founder of the Fair Housing Council of Delaware Valley and cofounder of Witness for Peace and Movement for a New Society, died Monday, October 14. He was 91 years old.
According to his obituary, Mr. Taylor grew up a Quaker, attended Abington and Germantown Friends Meeting, and spent his life traveling the world to promote peace, equality, and justice.
He modeled Mahatma Gandhi, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day as he publicly confronted questionable U.S. government policies, human rights violations, housing discrimination, violence and torture around the world. He was a field staffer in the 1960s for Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and he walked in the 1963 March on Washington.
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He also traveled to various Central American countries, as well as South Africa and beyond, to serve as a nonviolent deterrent to local brutality. He taught college classes on social justice and later worked nine years for the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Commission for World Peace and Justice.
Nearly 100 of his articles, papers, and pamphlets were published, and he produced videos and wrote a dozen books, guides, and manuals, including 1977′s Blockade: A Guide to Nonviolent Intervention and 1994′s Training Manual for Nonviolent Defense Against the Coup d’État.
“I’m especially concerned about all the torture practiced by governments that our government supports,” he told The Inquirer in 1982.
He and his wife, Phyllis, also a world peace activist, were featured in The Inquirer and other publications.
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He earned a bachelor’s degree at Haverford College and a yearlong Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship to the Yale Divinity School. He studied at Cornell University and what is now the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.
Services are to be held at 1:30pm on Saturday, December 14, at Germantown Friends Meeting, 47 W. Coulter Street in Philadelphia.
Donations in his name may be made to Face-to-Face, 123 E. Price Strreet, Philadelphia, and Against Malaria Foundation, Citibank NA, Box 7247-6370, Philadelphia.
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Photos: Newspaper.com, the family via The Inquirer