WASHINGTON – William Taylor, a Washington lawyer and civil rights activist for more than half a century who fought discrimination on many fronts and was particularly dedicated to desegregating the nation’s schools, died Tuesday at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md., of complications from a fall. He was 78.

In a career spanning six decades, Taylor worked largely behind the scenes in courtrooms and on Capitol Hill, advising members of Congress, drafting legislation and taking advantage of changing attitudes about race and equality to strengthen the nation’s civil rights laws and their enforcement.

One of his early mentors was Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Supreme Court justice. Taylor went to work for Marshall at the NAACP Legal and Education Defense Fund in 1954, months after the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawed public school segregation.

In 1958, Taylor helped write the NAACP’s legal brief for the Supreme Court case that compelled schools in Little Rock — and required schools across the nation — to comply with Brown v. Board and integrate public schools.

During the 1960s, Taylor was general counsel and staff director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He played a key role in organizing on-the-ground hearings and investigations into discrimination against blacks in the Deep South. The resulting recommendations by the commission became the foundation for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the late 1960s, he left the government to become a government watchdog. He launched two organizations to monitor the government’s efforts to enforce civil rights laws, the Center for National Policy Review at Catholic University, where he taught law, and later the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.

During the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Taylor lobbied for and helped draft stronger laws to address discrimination in housing, employment and voting. He also was in the group that led the fight against Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.

“They examined every article, every speech, every decision, every statement that Robert Bork ever made and put together the book on Bork — and that was literally and figuratively the foundation” for Bork’s rejection by the Senate, said Ralph Neas, the former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who chaired the Block Bork coalition.

Taylor was perhaps best known for his efforts to force states and cities to make good on the promise of equal schools for all. Through the courts, he pressed for the desegregation of a number of urban school districts.

In St. Louis, after a parent challenged the segregated school system, Taylor led negotiations in the 1980s that established the nation’s largest voluntary metropolitan school desegregation plan.

In recent years, Taylor helped draft No Child Left Behind, the 2002 federal law intended to boost the quality of the nation’s schools by measuring student progress on standardized tests, and he defended it against legal challenges.