Fred
Taylor, D.C. minister who helped close harrowing children’s shelter, dies at 87
By
Bart Barnes
November
28, 2019 at 2:26 p.m. EST
Fred
Taylor, a Baptist clergyman who became a social activist and guardian of child
welfare, playing a key role in the 1973 closure of Junior Village, a
malfunctioning, overcrowded, understaffed and abusive D.C. center for
impoverished children, died Nov. 23 at his home in Washington. He was 87.
The
cause was cancer, said his wife, Sherrill Taylor.
Mr.
Taylor was the founding executive director of For Love of Children (FLOC), an
advocacy and support organization that for more than 50 years has provided shelter,
counseling, educational and training opportunities, and health services to
thousands of needy, neglected and homeless children in Washington.
He
joined the group in 1968, at a turning point in his ministry. A graduate of
Vanderbilt University and Yale Divinity School, he had served as the pastor of
a Baptist church in Northern Virginia. But by the early ’60s, he was
spiritually unfulfilled and at loose ends. Fifty years later, in a FLOC video,
he recalled that he was “listening for what I might be called to do in this
world.”
Mr.
Taylor resigned his pastorate and took a job with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
War on Poverty. These were peak years of the civil rights movement, and a group
of Washington-area clergy chartered an airplane to fly to Alabama for the 1965
Selma-to-Montgomery protest march led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
When
the clergymen returned to Washington, several asked themselves, “Where is our
Selma?”
For
Mr. Taylor and others, it would be Junior Village, a collection of 13 cottages
in a neighborhood of wrecked cars, a sewage treatment plant and a dump in a
barren and desolate strip in far Southwest Washington. When Junior Village
became excessively crowded, tents were pitched to handle the overflow.
News
reports described it as a fearsome place of violence, rape and disorder where
big children beat up little children, drugs were the primary antidote for
disruptive behavior, and food was so meager that children near the end of the
cafeteria line often could find only stale slices of bread to eat.
But
in 1958 the child-care facility had opened to fanfare and high expectations.
First lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and King made
highly publicized visits. Handpicked Junior Village children were Christmas
guests at the White House. It was said to be the largest such facility for
children in the nation, housing 900 boys and girls — mostly African American —
from the age of 6 months to 18, including the disabled and mentally ill.
It
had acquired a reputation as a house of horrors by 1965, when the Rev. Gordon
Cosby, a minister at Washington’s Church of the Saviour, formed FLOC after his
return from the Selma march. Mr. Taylor, who soon came on as the group’s
director, made it his mission to shut down Junior Village.
Foster
parents were recruited. Group houses were established. There was financial
support from charitable foundations, churches and government sources. It took
eight years, but in 1973 Junior Village closed.
[It was created as a refuge for needy kids.
Instead, they were raped and drugged.]
Mr.
Taylor would stay on as FLOC’s chief, building an organization that would grow
into a $10 million a year nonprofit with 130 staffers, serving 1,200 children
in programs that included housing, school tutoring, wilderness camps and crisis
interventions before retiring in 2003. (Many of the group’s initiatives were
handed off to other community-based organizations.)
In
1999, Mr. Taylor published a book, “Roll Away the Stone,” about FLOC and the
problems faced by poor children nationwide.
“When
you reflect on the life and work of Fred Taylor,” wrote Washington Post
reviewer Colman McCarthy, “no fitter line comes to mind than this: ‘The trouble
with a good idea is it soon degenerates into hard work.’ ”
Mr.
Taylor, he added, was “part Saul Alinsky, part George Wiley, part Geno Baroni —
three well-remembered and much-missed radicals who went into big-city
neighborhoods to find poor people waiting to have their grit organized into a
force for self-improvement.”
Fred
Taylor, the third of four children, was born May 23, 1932, in Princeton, Ky.,
where his father ran a lumber company. He graduated from Vanderbilt in 1954 and
received a master’s degree in divinity from Yale in 1957, then was a Baptist minister
in Branchville, Va., and at Westmoreland Baptist Church in McLean.
His
marriage to Anne Jarman ended in divorce.
Survivors
include his wife of 31 years, Sherrill Rudy Taylor of Washington; three
children from his first marriage, Sarah Harris of Chapel Hill, N.C., Fred
Taylor of Falls Church, Va., and Grace Taylor of Louisville, Colo.; a
stepdaughter, Jocelyn Kovalenko of Bothell, Wash.; and eight grandchildren.
Mr.
Taylor was a golfer and a baseball fan, a summertime regular at Nationals Park,
not far from his home in Washington. When he was in his 50s, he participated in
an Outward Bound program that included survival training in the wilderness. It
was “reinvigorating,” he told his family.
“I’ve based my life on a call rather than a
career,” he once told Washingtonian magazine.
In
1954, when Mr. Taylor was preparing to leave for Yale, a mentor in Kentucky
told him, “If you go, you’ll never come back, not because you wouldn’t be
accepted, but because you will have changed.”
“He
was right,” Mr. Taylor later told The Post, adding that he hoped for the same
change for the children he worked with in FLOC, the children he rescued from
Junior Village.
“It’s
a long-distance run,” he said.
