Nominated by Jimmy Carter on May 17, 1979
Legislative assistant / Detroit office manager, U.S. Rep. Charles C. Diggs, Jr., 1967-70
Representative Charles C. Diggs, Jr. (Democrat, Michigan) 1955-1980
They married in 1960 and moved to Detroit.
Taylor, 73, is a liberal with Democratic roots and defended civil-rights workers in the South in the 1960s
Taylor was born Anna Katherine Johnston in 1932 in Washington, D.C. Her father was treasurer of Howard University. Her mother was a homemaker and a business teacher.
Unable to get a job as a lawyer at New York or Washington, D.C., law firms -- a near impossibility for black people, especially women, in the 1950s -- Taylor turned to the Solicitor's Office of the U.S. Department of Labor. She became a lawyer there with the help of J. Ernest Wilkins, then assistant secretary of labor and the first black person appointed to a subcabinet post. He also was a friend of her father's.
In Washington, Taylor met Charles Diggs Jr., son of a wealthy Detroit mortician and a rising star in Congress.
In 1966, Taylor became an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit, but left the following year to manage her husband's Detroit congressional office.
During the next five years, she and Diggs divorced. She also campaigned for Coleman Young, helping him become Detroit's first black mayor.
In 1975, Young asked her to become a staff lawyer to defend his programs to integrate city government.
A year later, she married S. Martin Taylor, then director of the Michigan Employment Security Commission.
In 1984, Taylor banned nativity scenes on municipal property in Birmingham and Dearborn in ACLU lawsuits.
In 1979, Anna Diggs Taylor became the first black woman judge to be appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. Nineteen years later, she became the first black woman Chief Judge for that circuit as well.
