The commission approved the amendment by a 5-3 vote, but opposition was growing rapidly.<\/p>\n
In a strange coincidence, it was led by one of her talent-agent husband\u2019s best-known clients, Ms. Bryant<\/a>, a singer, former beauty pageant contestant and spokeswoman for Florida orange juice who had become involved in conservative Christian causes.<\/p>\n Soon after the vote, Ms. Bryant, who had often socialized with the Shacks, called Ms. Shack at home.<\/p>\n \u201cI am going to have to oppose you,\u201d Ms. Bryant said, according to \u201cRebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South\u201d (2001) by James T. Sears. Then she began to read from the Bible.<\/p>\n \u201cI grew up during the Holocaust,\u201d Ms. Shack, who was Jewish, responded. \u201cI see this as a human rights issue.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Bryant said she disagreed and hung up.<\/p>\n Over the next several months, Ms. Bryant gained a national following with her campaign to overturn the law, drawing donations from around the country for an anti-gay coalition that she founded and called Save Our Children. Ms. Shack, for her part, received death threats and denunciations from religious leaders.<\/p>\n In a referendum in June 1977, 69 percent of Dade County voters favored overturning the law. Many observers said it was the end of Ms. Shack\u2019s political career, but she handily won re-election in 1978 and remained in office until 1986. During that time, she championed other causes, including the county\u2019s first historic-preservation law.<\/p>\n She also led the effort to approve an audacious project by the French husband-and-wife artists Christo<\/a> and Jeanne-Claude<\/a> to wrap 11 islands in Biscayne Bay in pink fabric. The 1983 project, \u201cSurrounded Islands,\u201d<\/a> became an international sensation and helped establish the city as a major arts center.<\/p>\n Ruth Naomi Burrows was born on Aug. 24, 1931, in Brooklyn and raised in Bay Shore, on the South Shore of Long Island. Her mother, Roslyn (Zimmerman) Burrows, was an interior designer who helped her father, James Burrows, run his wallpaper and art-supply store.<\/p>\n The store was a popular pit stop for artists on their way to the East End of Long Island; Jackson Pollock was a regular customer.<\/p>\n Growing up in the store instilled a lifelong love of art in Ms. Shack, while growing up in a liberal family instilled a lifelong love of politics. \u201cOther people wanted to be Shirley Temple,\u201d she told The Miami Herald in 1984. \u201cI wanted to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt.\u201d<\/p>\n She spent two years at Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia (now the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg) before dropping out, telling her father that college was a \u201cpoor investment.\u201d Returning to New York City, she designed storefront displays and campaigned for the 1952 Democratic presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson.<\/p>\n Ms. Shack received a bachelor\u2019s degree in English from Barry College (now University) in Miami in 1970 and a master\u2019s degree in social science from the University of Colorado in 1975.<\/p>\n She met Richard Shack on a blind date, and they married in 1953. After the wedding, they hopped into his red Hudson convertible and drove to Miami Beach for a two-week honeymoon.<\/p>\n They fell in love with the city and decided to stay, despite concerns about overt prejudice. They faced antisemitism, and Black visitors in Miami Beach, including those Mr. Shack represented, had to leave town at sundown or risk arrest.<\/p>\n But it was also a rapidly growing place, and Ms. Shack embraced opportunities to change it. While raising their three daughters, she became active in local Jewish organizations, civil rights activities and the women\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n Mr. Shack died in 2012. Along with their daughter Barbara, Ms. Shack is survived by two other daughters, Janice Shack-Marquez and Lynda Streitenberger; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n After leaving the Dade County Commission in 1986, Ms. Shack became president of the Dade Community Foundation (now the Miami Foundation), an arts and cultural organization that in her hands grew into one of the largest in Florida. She retired in 2009.<\/p>\n In 1998, the county commission passed a new anti-discrimination ordinance almost identical to the one Ms. Shack had sponsored more than two decades earlier. This time, the city\u2019s political and cultural leadership turned out en masse to support it \u2014 a sign, Ms. Shack liked to say, of how much Miami had changed.<\/p>\n \u201cLife here was and is so remarkably exciting and wonderful, and it changes every hour on the hour,\u201d she told Outwords magazine in 2018<\/a>. \u201cI tell people, \u2018If you don\u2019t like change, get out. You\u2019re going to hate it here, because it won\u2019t be the same next week.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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