SYRACUSE, N.Y. — When you first meet Sally Roesch Wagner, you wouldn't expect that she’s been arrested multiple times for civil protests or has an FBI file from her activism work in the 1960s. 

“I had bleach-blonde hair, lots of makeup,” said Wagner. “I was wearing heels and a knit suit and had 'suburban’ written all over me, ‘suburban housewife.’”

Wagner came from a conservative, religious family in South Dakota, eventually moving to Sacramento, California, with her ex-husband. But when watching the events of the 1960s unfold on national television, she decided to take action, ultimately changing her entire life. 

“The news was constantly the Vietnam War, it was being covered really regularly,” Wagner. said in a recent interview “And it was, I remember a picture of a North Vietnamese mother holding her baby. And the baby as I remembered had been napalmed.”

Vietnamese women and children are rounded up at a hamlet in the Mekong Delta and guarded by South Vietnamese government troops on April 24, 1964. (AP Photo)

Watching this scene made her think of her young children, completely fine and safe, sleeping upstairs. 

“I can’t not do something,” said Wagner. “And I got involved in ‘Another Mother for Peace’. And that lead one thing, to another, to another.”

Sally’s involvement with the anti-war movement led to her involvement with the women’s movement, and her passion for Matilda Joslyn Gage, a suffragist from Cicero. 

Her passion for Gage brought Wagner to Syracuse in the 1990s, and she then began teaching at Syracuse University. She’s lived in the Westcott neighborhood ever since, due to its activism community.

Passion for Matilda Joslyn Gage, a suffragist from Central New York, brought Sally Wagner cross-country to Syracuse. (Katie Nedder/Future Journalists Project)

Over the years, Sally has been the recipient of many awards due to her work with activism and the Women’s Movement.

Karen Mihalyi is a neighbor of Sally’s and an activist in the Syracuse area since the 1960s.

“We’re a part of a major shift, a major transformation,” said Mihalyi. “And we saw ourselves as really being like really changing the world.”

Sally Roesch Wagner looks through old clippings while recalling her decades of fighting for equality and justice in the world. (Katie Nedder/Future Journalists Project)

At 82 years old, Wagner continues to work toward justice, equality and a better world for everyone.

“I fell in love with a dead woman, a suffragist,” Wagner said of Gage. “A woman who in her major work, her final words are ‘we’re in the midst of a revolution, such as the world has never seen. We will overthrow every existing institution, the result will be a regenerated world.’ She wrote this in 1893.”