For six decades, Dorothy Mae Taylor worked in public service, focusing on issues of racial equality and women’s rights. Taylor began her career as a social activist in the late 1940s. As the parent-teacher association president for two of the schools her children attended, she led a fight against the Orleans Parish School Board demanding equality within the segregated system and eventually won supplies and funding for black schools on par with those for white children. Her participation in the civil rights movement continued with her successful efforts to desegregate the facilities of the New Orleans Recreation Department and to register African American voters.

A trailblazer, Taylor became the first African American woman elected to the Louisiana State Legislature, in 1971; the first woman to receive the Legislator of the Year award, in 1972; the first African American woman to head a state department (Urban and Community Affairs), in 1984; and one of the first two women (along with Peggy Wilson)—and the first African American woman—to serve on the New Orleans City Council, in 1986. As a council member, Taylor braved torrents of criticism in 1992 after presenting an ordinance banning discrimination in the membership of Mardi Gras krewes, a move that paved the way for their desegregation.