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Marvin Schachter, Six Decades the Advocate of Social Causes, Dies at 90

Published on Tuesday, February 17, 2015 | 11:29 am
 
Marvin Schachter, civil rights advocate, passed away at 91 in a local hospital on Tuesday, February 17, 2015, sources said.

 

Marvin Schachter, a leading advocate of major social causes for over 60 years, a Board Member of the Pasadena-Foothills Chapter of the ACLU, and a co-founder of the Pasadena Weekly newspaper, died Tuesday in a local hospital, according to sources close to his family. He was 90.

Schachter was president of the Advisory Council of the Los Angeles County Area Agency on Aging and the chairman of the Senior Advisory Council. He was a member of the  American Civil Liberties Union Southern California Board for 56 years and a past President of it.  He was a lifetime member of the national ACLU Board of Directors.

Fellow ACLU Board member Kris Ockershauser said that Schachter got his start as an activist as a high school student.

“In the depression, in Brooklyn, his older brother Harold was organizing streetcorner counter demonstrations against the notorious Fr. Coughlin’s Christian Front, whose black shirt orators were terrorizing Jewish, black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods,” Ockershauser recounts. “His brother told him to get on the podium and say whatever came to mind, but just make sure the last guy in the audience could hear him.  This started him on a lifetime of social activism on behalf of the under dog and marginalized in society.”

Tuesday, Ockershauser remembered Schachter as “a man of principle and a man who acted on his principles.”

“As President of the ACLU of Southern California Board at the time, and a Pasadena resident, he brought ACLU in to aid the successful struggle to integrate Pasadena public schools, and to the effort to reform the city’s governing body of business interests to a Council of neighborhood representatives,” she wrote Pasadena Now.

“I think the best way to remember Marvin is to carry on his leadership in working for economic and racial justice, peace and democratic participation, and advancement of civil liberties and civil rights. His words at the ACLU’S Bill of Rights Dinner honoring his more than 50 years of service say it best:

“There are no permanent defeats… There are no permanent victories… There is no final conflict.

Vigilence is still the price of Liberty… Vigilence is the price of Justice… Vigilance is the price of Equality…”

Schachter was educated at Brooklyn College, University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Cambridge University.

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