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Transcript of full Marge Rogatz interview

BY OLIVIA WINSLOW | olivia.winslow@newsday.com

My name is Marge Rogatz. I am the president and CEO of Community Advocates [based in Roslyn Heights], which is an advocacy organization that has been involved, primarily in Nassau County, since 1972, in helping vulnerable populations obtain their entitlements from mostly public agencies, but also from private ones. And a great deal of the work we've done over the years has been in regard to people's rights, particularly people of color, and poor people. I have been president of Community Advocates since 1986. Before that, I worked as a consultant in community development and issues related to revitalization and helping families to cope with some of the things [that] people [who] are discriminated against have to cope with -- which means education, health and, particularly, housing. And before that, in my consulting, I did a user-needs study for Mayor [John]Lindsay. I did a study of the poverty-designated areas for Gene Nickerson, when he was county executive in Nassau. I worked for [ Suffolk] county executives Dennison and Klein and did work that really identified, again, how services are delivered, where are the gaps and what can be done about it. I came to this from having worked in the civil rights movement. I had gone to national CORE [Congress of Racial Equality] with Lincoln Lynch, who at the time he went to national CORE was director of Long Island CORE. And when Lincoln went to CORE as the associate national director, I went as a special assistant to Jim Farmer [CORE's co-founder and national director].

Q: Talk about your background.

Rogatz: I was born in New York City. I spent the first 9 years of my life in a housing development with my family in Queens, and then moved to Lawrence, which was a very different community when I grew up there. I graduated from Lawrence High School and I went to college, Smith College and Barnard.

Q: Tell us how you got into activism. Tell us about your background and your family environment and whether this was inspiration into leading you in the direction that you've been in for so long.

Rogatz: I grew up in a family that was an activist family. My father was an attorney. Actually, the very famous attorney Clarence Darrow had asked him to work with him and my father couldn't afford to because he had a family. But my family was always associated with causes, political and social. My brother and I grew up with friends of every color, different religions, different incomes. We used to describe our house as having rubber walls because everybody from anyplace was always welcome there. We were very fortunate. Our parents had friends who came from different backgrounds. And we were taught, without even knowing we were taught, before we even understood it, that everyone can make a difference. So that before we could even say those words, it was part of our lifestyle to feel that you make a difference. We have a family that is interracial, ecumenical. People from Colombia, African-Americans, both from Trinidad and here. It's a family that reflects the things that we've grown up believing in.

Q: Now talk about the various activism that you've been a part of. What led you to get into activism?

Rogatz: When I was in high school I was in the student government, and we reached out to find a place where kids could go after school on ... the weekend. And we established such a place ... So I started very early finding out that if you work at things, that you can help to provide for something that doesn't exist, whether it's a service or a building, or a change in zoning. These were things that we were up against in high school.

Q: Now talk about the real activism and give us some years of your involvement.

Rogatz: When our kids were little, we were living in Roslyn Heights and we were very much involved with the African-American community in Roslyn Heights, which lived in the housing project. Our kids went to school with these kids and they became our friends, the children and parents. And we became involved very early in issues of special education and children in the Roslyn school district being literally siphoned off out of the regular classroom into special classrooms and into BOCES. Our kids were very little when we became aware of these issues. But I really should say we chose where we lived, my husband and I, when we moved from Manhattan to a house because we had a baby and another baby was coming. We chose where we lived, based on the fact that our children would go to a school where there would be people of different incomes, different colors and different religions. And at that time in Roslyn, our community was really, in terms of religion, one-third Jewish, one-third Catholic and one-third Protestant. And the black community that lived in Roslyn had been here for generations, and also had people who came up to work as domestics. And among those people was Hazel Dukes [now president of the NAACP New York State Conference]. And Hazel and I became friends when we were just in our early 20s ... A number of us had put together what we called the Roslyn Civil Rights Committee. It was in support of the beginnings of the movement in the South, Mississippi summer, which is when the three young men were killed [James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman]. We were very much involved in trying to get help for the young people in Mississippi. We knew the three kids who were killed, all of them. My husband at that time was working at Stony Brook helping to set up the Health Sciences Center there, and he went down to Mississippi. He's a physician, but he's a physician in public health, and he went down to Mississippi to help set up a community clinic. And I would say that was probably 1964 or '65. I became very much involved in Long Island CORE. LI CORE's issues were things that ranged from where people were living in Riverhead and the duck farms. They were living in actual chicken houses. They were chicken coops. They were terrible. You can't even say shanties because shanties was something that was bigger than these places were. Lincoln Lynch and Irwin Quintyne and others who were the leaders of LI CORE from the African-American community, and most of the people -- the migrant workers -- were people of color, needed white support. And we became part of that movement. We picketed, we raised money, we organized and that was one aspect of it. Another aspect had to do with education. The Malverne schools where Lincoln's kids actually were ... and the kids in Malverne from Lakeview, which was a relatively higher-income community, were really segregated because white people, either their kids went to the Rockville Centre schools or they went to Catholic school. But they made sure that if they were in the Malverne school, the black kids and the white kids were treated differently. They were raised the same [black and white children from Lakeview and Malverne]. Their parents all expected them to do well. The kids came into school all expecting the same thing, but they didn't get the same thing. And Malverne was an important watershed for Long Island. We picketed, a lot of us got arrested. Lincoln wouldn't let me get arrested because I had two small kids at home. But this was just part of saying that the civil rights movement isn't just down South. It's really important that we support the people down South ... but we really have to look in our communities, at the housing and the education and the conditions here. Peter [her husband]and I tested housing for people who wanted to rent apartments and people who wanted to buy relatively expensive homes. We tested Hazel's apartment. Hazel and her friend wanted to rent an apartment on Edwards Street in Roslyn Heights. This was in the early '60s. It was before the march [on Washington], before Aug. '63. They were told there were no apartments in the garden apartment there [Rogatz and her husband were offered the apartment, leading to Dukes' housing discrimination complaint] ... We simply did not allow a situation to arise where we didn't try to use it to change policies and practices. And we got very good at it.

Q: Was there anything about all of this kind of activism that produced moments of fear, and if so, how did you overcome that?

Rogatz: Our kids were sometimes discriminated against because they had close friends who lived in the projects. It was a subtle kind of discrimination. If our friend Laura Madden's kids were absent from Peggy, our daughter's class, the teacher would say, 'Would you take this child's homework home to them?' And the same thing happened with our son, Bill. There was an assumption that they could connect our children with their black friends. And they didn't respect the parents in the way we would've liked, and they didn't respect the kids at all as we would've wanted. And yet they would say, knowing that we would ask, 'OK, we'll ask the Rogatz kids to take their [black kids'] homework home to the project.' It was a way of pointing out that our kids were different. Not as different as their black friends, but different. I never felt personal fear. I worried for our kids, when I went to work with Lincoln Lynch on LI, and then later in New York when I went to work with Jim Farmer at the National Congress of Racial Equality office ... so that I worked in Harlem. I felt protected there. I certainly knew I was the only white person in the organization, in the actual office. I didn't feel fear in Harlem. I was only worried once, and that was when we were doing an action in Baltimore. And it was a job action on behalf mostly of youth, and we were working with Baltimore CORE. I really was doing two things there. I was helping picket, but I also was helping with media relations ... I did a lot of press relations [at national CORE]. The police certainly wanted us to stay in one place in that Baltimore situation. And it's the only time I felt that I was threatened. And I wasn't threatened by the community with which I was working. I was worried about the police. But in those days that was what one worried about, really.

Q: You've been involved in so many things. Were there times when you faltered, felt it was too hard, that things you fought for were being overturned. Like Brown vs. Board of Education recently being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Do you think, 'I can't do this kind of work anymore?'

Rogatz: I think a long time ago I realized that there are two sets of goals that one is working for. One is the long- term, overall goal. And another one has to be short term and very specific. I can really link it to my work at Community Advocates. We've been working since 1986 on homelessness and affordable housing. Homelessness is an intractable problem. We said we've got to do something specific to have a success because it's too hard. When we started working on homelessness in Nassau County, the county executive who was then not Mr. Suozzi, said we had no homeless problem in Nassau County. But we called agencies that were dealing with homelessness to come and meet. Ninety agencies came in a blizzard to come and meet on this problem that didn't exist. So when you looked at the big problem you could be overwhelmed by it and discouraged by it. But if you pick off a piece and work hard and really effectively on that piece and get a success, that small piece keeps you going. Community Advocates in 1989 bought a six-apartment building in Roslyn Heights so we could say yes in my backyard and not no. We bought that building with the help of the state, and opened and ran the first apartments for homeless families in Nassau County. And this was permanent rental housing for formerly homeless families. When you do that kind of thing, you are able to get some consolation about how far the goal is by setting some smaller ones.Last March, County Executive [Thomas] Suozzi appointed me chair of the 10-year plan to end homelessness in Nassau County. That's a huge goal. You have to have immediate action steps that you can actually see something happen in order to keep moving towards the further goal. And in terms of civil rights, homelessness is really something that's important to me because a totally disproportionate number of people who are homeless in Nassau and Suffolk counties are people of color. If you look at the Nassau figures alone, you're talking about more than two-thirds of people who are homeless are people of color. And obviously it's because of the absolute prevalence of institutional racism. So these things are connected. Everything that I have done; I helped to found Sustainable Long Island 10 years ago -- that's a question of saying the environment that we live in has to be protected. Our economy has to be secure or we won't have a Long Island healthy, vibrant community for anybody. And it's all based on equity. If everybody does not have access, then nobody is going to be in good shape. I'm on the board of the Long Island Community Foundation, and the Long Island Community Foundation board members helped to establish, with Elaine Gross as our consultant, Erase Racism. We set it up as a project of the foundation and then it became an independent, not for profit. I'm very proud to say the president of the board of Erase Racism is a board member of LI Community Foundation ... And I have been secretary and an officer since we founded it. So all of these things come together. And when you look at how difficult things are and how discouraging things can be, what you have to do is say, 'OK, what do you do about it?' And what you do about it is you mobilize resources. You set up collaborations that lead to effective resources, new resources and programs that can address specific issues.

Q: What is your proudest moment, most significant accomplishment?

Rogatz: One is working at national CORE with Jim Farmer. I was a white person who -- I was so privileged, I can't tell you how privileged I was and I have known ever since then that ... I mean, I was trained by Sol Alinsky. I knew Stokely Carmichael. I worked with giants in our history, many of whom are not known to our kids now, but they were part of my life and my kids' life, I should add. What I was able to do working for and with people like that -- I knew Dr. King -- I ... was just extremely fortunate. And more recently, I think the most important thing really has been to be able to help set up Erase Racism, because I really believe we are changing the conversation on LI. I think Elaine Gross is a brilliant leader. I think that we are really ... the climate has to change, and I think that we are doing a lot to make that happen.

Q: How would you like to be remembered?

Rogatz: As somebody who made a difference. I'd like to be remembered as somebody who cared about the dignity of every human being with whom I ever had any contact. And who tried very hard to make a difference in the community at large.

Q: How do you feel about the future in terms of race relations, in terms of dealing with these intractable problems. Are you optimistic or not?

Rogatz: Well, first of all, when I think of the future, I have to start by saying I knew Jesse Jackson, and when Jesse ran in 1988 for president of the United States it was a serious effort that got attention only as a sidebar. We have Barack Obama as a model now for our white and black children. Whether he wins or not, he is a serious candidate and he will be in our future, I am absolutely convinced. And there'll be more Barack Obamas. So I have to be optimistic about the fact that I believe in people living together. My family represents people living together. Our communities are more interracial and intercultural. There is a possibility of more respect. So I have to be optimistic.

Q: How do you think your generation of activists will be regarded by history?

Rogatz: I wonder if my generation of activists is the last of its kind. I worry when I think of those of us who fought for civil rights, for feminist ideals, for peace, the anti-Vietnam battle. I'm not sure whether activists will take the same routes. Maybe those aren't the only routes to take. But if I'm looking at, for example, our current [U.S.]Supreme Court, I could despair. I think that what the Bush administration has accomplished in changing the federal court system across the country and in changing the Supreme Court will affect generations. So that is something that is quite terrifying. I think that if we can elect a president and Congress who can enact some laws to reinstate the things that have been demolished ... So we have to change all these things. We take two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back, depending on the issue. But we have to keep going forward.