Orville Walters Taylor was a white man born September 20, 1917, in Wesson, Arkansas, the son of Rev. William Oscar Taylor and Minnie Belle White Taylor. He graduated from Berryville, Arkansas, High School in 1934. As an officer in the Army Air Corps in World War II, Taylor served in the 1716th Signal Battalion attached to the headquarters of the Fifth Air Force under Generals MacArthur, Kinney, and Whitehead in New Guinea and the Philippines. On November 24, 1944, he survived a kamikaze attack on the troop transport USS Alpine as he was about to land on Leyte Island. Taylor retired as Lieutenant Colonel, United States Air Force Reserves in 1971. He graduated from Ouachita Baptist College in 1947 with a B.A. in history and obtained an M.A. in history from the University of Kentucky in 1948 and a Ph.D. in history from Duke University in 1955. Taylor served as a Southern Baptist missionary teacher in Nigeria from 1955-1962. He served as a member of the faculty of the Departments of History at Little Rock Junior College, 1950-55; Duke University, 1962-63; and Asheville-Biltmore College, 1963-65; and served as Chairman of the Departments of History at Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia, 1965-69; and Georgia College, Milledgeville, Georgia, 1969-83. Taylor was a noted historian of slavery in his native state. His book, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Duke University Press, 1958), received wide acclaim and remains the standard work on the subject, the University of Arkansas Press having reissued the book in its Arkansas Classics series in 2000. Upon retirement Taylor resided in Clearwater Beach, Florida, until 1994, and in Jacksonville, Florida, until his death. Taylor was a member of Hendricks Avenue Baptist Church, Jacksonville. He married Evelyn Adella Bonham in 1942, and the couple had four children.