Phyllis Taylor, pioneering hospice nurse, celebrated prison chaplain, and renowned world peace activist, has died at 84
She got arrested for civil disobedience, advocated for prison reform, and cofounded and directed several nonprofit social service programs.
As a young nurse in Philadelphia, Phyllis Taylor met dying people desperate for hospice care. So she did it.
She met people in prison desperate for a healthcare advocate and an empathetic chaplain. So she did that, too.
In 1963, she met Sarah Baker and her family as they struggled to live as the first Black family in Folcroft, Delaware County. The Bakers were desperate for fearless allies to help fend off months of racism and violence. She also did that.
For nearly her whole life, Phyllis Taylor championed peace, justice, and human rights, and helped people who were desperate. She got arrested for civil disobedience, cofounded and directed several nonprofit social service programs, and, with her husband, Richard, helped establish Witness for Peace in Nicaragua, and the Movement for a New Society in Philadelphia.
She fed the hungry at St. Vincent de Paul Church, befriended immigrants and refugees with the New Sanctuary Movement, and comforted children and families at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. “Her entire life was about giving,” her son Dan said. “She refused to be someone who watched injustice and did nothing.”
On Thursday, June 4, Phyllis Taylor died of endometrial cancer at KeystoneCare Hospice in Wnydmoor. She was 84.
“I really love what I do,” Mrs. Taylor told the Pennsylvania Prison Society in 2025. “I get the satisfaction of being able to journey with somebody, to let them know that they are not abandoned and alone.”
Born in Brooklyn, Mrs. Taylor earned a bachelor’s degree at what is now Arcadia University in 1963. After nursing school, she became a volunteer nurse and then a consultant for the University of Pennsylvania health services at Holmesburg Prison and elsewhere.
She became senior counselor of hospice service for the new Death and Dying Program at Albert Einstein Medical Center’s Northern Division in 1978, and taught classes about death and grief, counseled parents whose babies had died, and comforted patients with terminal illnesses.
She was featured in a 1980 story in the Sunday Inquirer called “The Gift of a Good Death” and said that her own health scares motivated her to embrace nursing. The horrors of the Holocaust, she said, compelled her to human rights activism, and the deaths of a friend, her brother, and her father moved her to hospice work.
“It makes me happy to give someone the gift of a good death,” she told The Inquirer.
Mrs. Taylor was also an enterostomal therapy nurse, head of the AIDS committee at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine medical center, and director of education at the old Hospice of Delaware Valley. She wrote research articles for journals and letters to the editor, appeared on local TV and radio shows, and lectured often at conferences and seminars about death, grief, and medical and financial ethics. She never retired.
She went on Freedom Rides to integrate buses in the South and moved in temporarily with the Bakers as they sought to integrate Folcroft in the 1960s. In the 1970s, she demonstrated against the Vietnam War and America’s involvement in Iran and elsewhere.
In the 1980s, she taught civil disobedience classes and protested violence at the border between Nicaragua and Honduras. In the 1990s and beyond, she volunteered to protect Muslims and Arabs from reprisals after the Sept. 11 attacks, traveled the world to decry pollution and unfair housing practices, and volunteered with Amnesty International and Planned Parenthood.
She earned credentials as a chaplain and volunteered for decades with the Pennsylvania Prison Society to counsel and advocate for crime victims and prisoner rights. She was featured in the 2016 documentary Blockade, named the Prison Society’s Volunteer of the Year in 2022, and honored at Arcadia’s 2025 Women Who Lead Forum.
“She felt a deep unwavering need to dedicate all her waking time to marginalized populations,” her son said. “Someone called her a merging of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mother Teresa.”
Phyllis Claire Brody was born Aug. 10, 1941. She grew up Jewish in Lawrence, N.Y., and joined a Quaker meeting after she moved to Philadelphia.
» READ MORE: Mrs. Taylor shows her courage in 1963
She met fellow peace activist Richard Taylor at a civil rights event in 1962, and they married in 1963, and lived in Germantown, Mount Airy, and West Philadelphia. They reared their son, Dan, and daughter, Deborah, and welcomed Blessing Mtshali and other children and families into their home for extended stays. Her husband died in 2024.
Mrs. Taylor and her husband liked to hike and canoe. She lived with lupus and mailed handmade birthday cards to family and friends year after year.
“What a life well lived,” her son said.
In addition to her children, Mrs. Taylor is survived by her sisters, Margaret Noonan and Audrey Randolph, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and other relatives. A brother died earlier.
A celebration of her life is to be held at 2 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 20, at Germantown Monthly Meeting, 47 W. Coulter St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19144.
Donations in her name may be made to the New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, Box 46242, Philadelphia, Pa. 19160; and Face to Face, 123 E. Price St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19144.
