‘A force to be reckoned with’: Miami community leader Ruth Shack dies at 94
Ruth Shack came to Miami Beach in 1953 on her honeymoon and never returned.
She and her groom, Richard Shack, fell in love with the area on a two-week trip after their wedding and decided to stay — a decision that would change not only their own lives, but also the future of the new city they called home.
Shack would later enter politics, serving three terms as a Dade County commissioner, and then entering the nonprofit world as head of the Dade Community Foundation (now The Miami Foundation). She became known as a fierce advocate for the LGBTQ community after sponsoring in 1977 an amendment to Miami-Dade’s Human Rights Ordinance that protected people from workplace, housing and other types of discrimination based on their sexual orientation.
“She was a force to be reckoned with,” said Richard Milstein, Shack’s friend. “She was always speaking her mind and fighting for everyone. She set a pattern for all of us for what we should do.”
After more than seven decades in South Florida, Shack died Saturday of complications from a respiratory illness. She was 94 years old.
Shack was born in Long Island, New York, and studied at the University of Virginia for two years before dropping out and moving back to New York to work at an advertising agency. It was then she met Richard on a blind date, where he told her after 30 minutes that he planned to marry her. The couple was wed for nearly 60 years, until his death in 2012.
Shack earned her bachelor’s degree from Barry University in 1970 and a master’s degree from the University of Colorado in 1975. In 1976, she became a county commissioner, and it was in January 1977 that she sponsored the amendment to the Human Rights Ordinance that added protections on the basis of sexual orientation.
“Being born a Democrat, being raised a liberal, being exposed to all of the revolution in my family, coming to Miami desperate to change the antisemitic, anti-black attitudes, my being a part of changing those two antis, as I say, being a part of the civil rights movement and then being one of the founding mothers in town of the women’s revolution — this was the next natural step for me,” Shack said in a 2018 interview with Outwords. “It was not a big deal. It was correct.”
Coconut Grove native Damian Pardo was one of the lives that Shack touched through her work.
Pardo is the city of Miami’s District 2 commissioner and is the first openly gay Miami commissioner. When he was 13 years old, he remembers thinking of Shack as his hero because of how she spoke up for members of Miami’s LGBTQ community. Her actions made him feel comfortable telling his family about his sexual orientation.
“Ruth was speaking for people that were struggling with their sexual orientation,” he said in an interview Sunday. “At the time, there weren’t any voices. In the 1970s, gay people were vilified; we were an abomination.”
Shack’s efforts were later overturned when singer and Florida citrus spokeswoman Anita Bryant petitioned to put the ordinance on the ballot, stoking anti-gay sentiment that led it to be repealed in June of 1977. However, a decade later, the protections were restored in a 1998 vote.
“In the end, Anita Bryant’s victory was pyrrhic, and Ruth Shack emerged as one of LGBTQ America’s most cherished allies,” the Outwords biography of Shack says.
During her time as a commissioner, Shack also sponsored the county’s first historic preservation ordinance and persuaded her colleagues on the commission to approve “Surrounded Islands,” a now-famous installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude that wrapped pink fabric around a series of islands in Biscayne Bay.
After leaving office, Shack became the first CEO of the Dade Community Foundation, now known as The Miami Foundation. She envisioned Miami becoming a city with diverse leaders with “extraordinary values,” said Rebecca Fishman Lipsey, the foundation’s current president and CEO.
“I met her 18 years ago when I first moved to Miami,” Lipsey said. “She has been a mentor and mother to our organization.”
Shack retired in 2009, but even in her later years, she was actively involved with The Miami Foundation. In the past year, Lipsey fondly remembered a workshop where Shack interacted with the foundation’s staff.
“She’s remained a voice in our minds,” Lipsey said.
David Lawrence Jr., who served on the Dade Community Foundation board in the ‘90s, is among those who admire Shack’s many years of service to Miami.
“Ruth loved life and justice and books and straight talk and Miami,” said Lawrence, a retired publisher of the Miami Herald and chair of The Children’s Movement of Florida. “One of our community’s best-ever examples of public service.”
Shack is survived by three daughters, five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. The Shack family asks that donations be made to The Miami Foundation, which has set up a memorial fund in her honor.
In Shack’s absence, the legacy of the work she did to help others will live on, Pardo said.
“She may have passed, but her influence is very much still right here,” he said.
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