Proudly sponsored by: BSD Equity & Family Engagement

ALL are welcome: Students, Family, Community, and Educators

Tuesday, June 14, 5:15 p.m. – 6:19 p.m.

Please join us for another in our speaker series “Black History Beyond February” as Dr. Quintard Taylor, Ph.D. presents and engages in discussion on the history and importance of Juneteenth. Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States and the nation’s newest federal holiday.

Quintard Taylor

ABOUT YOUR EXPERT: Quintard Taylor is an historian, author, and website founder and director.  From July 1, 1998, until June 30, 2018, Taylor was the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History at the University of Washington, Seattle and as such he held the oldest endowed chair at the University.  He is now retired and holds the title, the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor Emeritus.

Taylor is the author of The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era, described in 2020 as one of the 10 most influential books published by the University of Washington Press in the past century, and In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the America West, 1528-1990, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History,  His Dr. Sam: Soldier, Educator, Advocate, Friend, An Autobiography, which Taylor co-authored with the late university administrator and career army officer, was released in the summer of 2010.


On February 1, 2007, Taylor and other volunteers created an online website resource center for African American history called BlackPast.org.  The center houses more than 8,000 pages of information and features contributions by nearly 1,000 academic, independent, and student historians from six continents.  It is now the largest reference center of its type on the Internet.  In 2021, 6.1 million people from more than 190 nations visited the website and so far since its launch more than 48 million people have accessed information from the pages of BlackPast.org.


The Bellevue School District acknowledges that we learn, work, live and gather on the Indigenous Land of the Coast Salish peoples, specifically the Duwamish and Snoqualmie Tribes. We thank these caretakers of this land, who have lived and continue to live here, since time immemorial.