Quintard Taylor, a prominent professor at the University of Washington and the founder of an online archive of Black history that reached curious minds across the globe, died Sunday at 76.

His daughter, state Rep. Jamila Taylor, D-Federal Way, shared the news in a post on Facebook.

“We’re taking some time as a family to grieve, but we are forever grateful for the time we had,” she said.

Fellow academics praised Taylor as a prolific, objective scholar and a mentor to the next generation who was committed to preserving Black history.

He’s best known for the online archive, called BlackPast.org, which unofficially started in 2004 and went live as an independent site in 2007. The website now has more than 8,000 entries, and includes profiles, articles on historical events, and primary source documents like letters, government reports and court opinions.

BlackPast’s board president, Douglas Bender, thanked Taylor “for his extraordinary contributions to the study of history, for founding BlackPast.org, and for creating a lasting legacy that will continue to educate, inspire, and guide future generations.”

“His work will live on in the minds of those who have learned from him and will continue to light the way for those who seek a better understanding of the world,” Bender said.

Taylor also authored and co-authored several books, including “In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990,” and “The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era.”

Taylor taught at various institutions, including Washington State University, before he was appointed the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington in 1999.

In 2019, the year after his retirement, Taylor gave the annual University Faculty Lecture at the UW, a prestigious recognition of his academic accomplishments. During that lecture, Taylor called BlackPast.org his “passion project,” recalling its rise from an academic reference site to the moment — after receiving an email from a high school student in New Zealand — that he realized it had global reach.

“We wanted to take that information beyond the ivory walls, beyond the walls of the university, and make it available to everyone,” he said.

He sought to amplify the stories of people of African descent that aren’t widely taught or known, and in that lecture focused on six Black women who “changed the West (and the world).”

They included Rachel B. Noel, who was the first Black woman elected to public office in Colorado when she served on the Denver School Board in the 1960s and fought against racial segregation in schools.

Also on the list: Carolyn Downs, a member of Seattle’s Black Panther Party who worked to bring health care to poor people in Seattle and for whom a medical center in the Central District is named.

His audience may not have known of these women, he said — but he hadn’t either.

“And I’ve taught African American history for almost all of my life, since 1971,” he said. “But these are women who are significant. These are women who, through their actions, changed their communities, changed the lives of a lot of people, changed America, certainly changed the West and changed America for the better.”

Earlier this year, Taylor told Seattle Times columnist Naomi Ishisaka that the information on the site had become even more valuable amid “a direct frontal assault on African American history.”

On top of the significant pushback in states to teaching American students about racism, the second Trump administration has sought to edit information at historical sites, including parks and museums, to cast American history in a positive light. Last week, The Washington Post reported the National Park Service has removed information about slavery, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the second World War, the killing of Native Americans and climate change from park sites.

“To the extent that (BlackPast) can add to that body of knowledge,” Taylor told Ishisaka, “it makes it more difficult to erase the facts or to erase history.”

Former UW President Ana Mari Cauce said Taylor put together “rich archives.”

“He saved a lot of that information that would have, quite frankly, disappeared,” Cauce said in an interview.

Cauce remembered Taylor as a kind and evenhanded scholar who presented the facts and welcomed debate and others’ interpretations.

Daudi Abe, a humanities instructor at Seattle Central College, said that while Taylor recognized Seattle was “a little bit ahead of the racial curve,” in that the area didn’t have the most glaring racist policies of the Jim Crow South, he also wasn’t a “cheerleader” who painted a rosy picture of what life has been like for Black people in Seattle.

Taylor wrote in “The Forging of a Black Community” that the city’s “apparent success, and its underlying failure, in its race relations paradigm has been its meticulously crafted image, which promoted the illusion of inclusion.”

“To me, that was the line of the book, ‘The illusion of inclusion,’” Abe said. “ … That was just put so well, and it’s so fitting, for, a lot of times, what can happen when you have what sometimes feels like passive aggressive nature around certain racial issues in this region.”

Abe first met Taylor after publishing a book on West Coast hip-hop. Abe went on to write entries for BlackPast.org and collaborated with Taylor on an entry about the history of people of African descent in King County.

He calls Taylor his “academic dad.”

“On many, many, many different levels, my life was unquestionably enriched by getting to know and hang out with that man,” Abe said.

Taylor was born on Dec. 11, 1948, in Brownsville, Tenn., to Quintard and Grace Taylor, sharecroppers who “cherished education,” according to a biography provided by BlackPast.

In the mid-1960s, Taylor asked his mother what was going on with the Civil Rights Movement and why it was happening, he told an interviewer in 2019.

His mother replied: “You should look it up. There’s a historical root for this.”

“As I began to research, I realized we were essentially trying to complete the Reconstruction process that began in the 1860s and 1870s,” he said, referencing the period after the Civil War. “That’s what got me involved in the idea of history — that events taking place now have a historical precedent.”

Details on a memorial service are not yet available but will be shared by BlackPast at a future date.