Marge Rogatz, a civil rights activist dedicated to fighting homelessness and racial injustice on Long Island, died Saturday at her home in Port Washington two days after suffering a stroke, her husband, Peter, confirmed. She was 97.

“I think she would like to be remembered as someone who fought for the underdog,” Peter Rogatz, 98, said in an interview. “It was just in her gut.”

Rogatz, whom loved ones recalled as a kind, upbeat woman with a strong moral code, cofounded several organizations dedicated to advancing social justice, including the Nassau-Suffolk Coalition for the Homeless and ERASE Racism.

Not long after graduating from Barnard College, in 1950, she joined the National Board of the Urban League. As the civil rights movement swept the nation, Rogatz, a white woman, played a leading role in Long Island's involvement.

In August 1963, she attended the March on Washington alongside her friend and civil rights trailblazer Hazel Dukes, Newsday previously reported. Rogatz was among a 2,000-person delegation from the Long Island Coordinating Committee. 

"It was the personal commitment that mattered," Rogatz told Newsday of the group in 1963. "They made their commitment by being here."  

And for nearly a century, Rogatz honored her own commitment to being in the fight for equality. Her death leaves "a hole in the fabric of the region," said Elaine Gross, founding president of ERASE Racism.

"I don't know that you can say that about a lot of people, that one individual can have such a big impact on a place the size of Long Island," Gross said. 

Born March 18, 1928, in New York City, Rogatz grew up in Sunnyside in Queens and then Lawrence on Long Island. One afternoon, she met a medical student at a mutual friend’s home in Pound Ridge. They spent the afternoon canoeing on the lake, and talking about art, politics and life.

“We fell in love instantly,” Peter Rogatz said. They married June 10, 1949. 

A pair of relationships with iconic activists helped to define Rogatz's work.

She served as special assistant to James Farmer, the national director of Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, one of the most influential civil rights organizations of the 1960s.

And for decades she worked alongside Dukes.

In the late 1950s, according to Newsday archives, she helped Dukes obtain housing at the Roslyn Gardens apartment complex. After Dukes was denied an apartment, as expected, she called Rogatz. Thirty minutes later, Rogatz and a pair of friends, also white, showed up at the complex pretending to be interested in renting. They were shown three apartments, Rogatz wrote in a Newsday guest essay in March after Dukes' death at 92. 

"Later that day, Hazel became the first Black tenant at the Roslyn Gardens complex," Rogatz said.

In 1986, she became president and CEO of Community Advocates Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to addressing homelessness. The group attracted some controversy when it announced it would convert an abandoned Roslyn apartment building into permanent housing for six homeless families, but Rogatz didn't waver, Newsday reported.

"We're talking about families who live in our own communities under terribly trying conditions," Rogatz told Newsday in 1991. "They're families who, through one single event like a co-op conversion or a fire or an eviction, are out there, in a situation where there are no rental apartments they can afford."

Thomas DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said he got to know Rogatz when he was running for state Assembly in 1986. She was, "in terms of civic activism, a living legend," DiNapoli, a native Long Islander, said. He joked that Rogatz and Dukes were "organizing in heaven right now."

"She understood that, at the end of the day, the big national issues have an application locally, and she wanted to bring that spirit and that passion that she had for justice, right to her own backyard," DiNapoli said. "Younger folks like me. ... learned from her. She was a mentor to many people on the grassroots level."

Rogatz instilled that sense of justice in her children, William Rogatz, of Landsdale, Pennsylvania, and Peggy Cash, of Glen Head, to whom she sang nursery rhymes. She could always tell when an animal was sick, Cash said, and she was a "flower woman" with a "fantastic garden."

"She had these raspberry plants that were quite prolific," Cash said. 

Her passion for social justice remained a constant even in her later years. On the most recent Erase RACISM board call May 6, four days before she died, Rogatz called in. 

In addition to her husband and two children, Rogatz is survived by her brother, Roy Plaut, and sister-in-law Olga Gomez Plaut, both of Atlanta; her grandson, Aiden Rogatz, of Chicago; and many nieces and nephews.

A private cremation will be held at Roslyn Heights Funeral Home. A virtual memorial service will be planned for a later date.

Joshua Needelman covers the Town of North Hempstead for Newsday. A Long Island native and University of Maryland graduate, his work has appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post.