Brazer, Marjorie Cahn

Secretary of the Ann Arbor (Mich.) Transportation Authority (AATA).

Marjorie Cahn Brazer, scholar and community leader, was for thirty years active in the civic and political affairs of Detroit and Ann Arbor beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing nearly up until her death in 1992. Born in 1927, she received her B.A. from Antioch College and her M.A. from Lehigh University. She lived in Detroit in the early 1950s and then moved to Ann Arbor in 1957 when her husband, Harvey Brazer, became a professor of economics at the University of Michigan.

Throughout her life, Marjorie Brazer was a firm believer in the value of citizen participation in local community affairs. She demonstrated this through membership in a myriad of organizational affiliations and through her advocacy of intergovernmental partnerships, women's political rights, and racial justice. Her public activism began in Detroit with participation in the local League of Women Voters. In Detroit, she also involved herself in the issue of urban renewal and neighborhood preservation through membership on the Detroit Committee for Neighborhood Conservation and Improved Housing.

Following her move to Ann Arbor, Brazer involved herself in her new community. In addition to becoming active in the local League of Women Voters, she helped to found (in her own living room) the Ann Arbor Area Association (soon renamed the Citizen's Association for Area Planning, CAAP). Through CAAP, Brazer participated in studies pertaining to Ann Arbor development, helped to influence city laws on the Briarwood Development (1971); and was active in issues relating to historic preservation and city planning.

In the 1960s, Brazer was a member of the Washtenaw County Citizen's Committee for Economic Opportunity (CEO), running the program office during its campaign for legal aid reform in 1965-66. She also joined the Coalition for Racial Justice and was on the Bi-Racial Committee of Huron High School. Brazer tried elective political office herself, running unsuccessfully for the office of county supervisor. During this same period, she served as a consulting economist for the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (1961-64), the Washtenaw County Metropolitan Planning Commission (1964-65), and the Michigan Department of Commerce (1965-66).

Perhaps her most lasting impact came with her work with the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority. As charter member and one-time acting Director of AATA, Brazer was instrumental in creating a public transportation system for urban (primarily Ann Arbor) Washtenaw County in the early 1970s. During her period of service, Ann Arbor established the Dial-a-Ride program.

Among her other interests was historical research, she was a lecturer at Eastern Michigan University and historian and biographer of eighteenth-century fur trader John Johnston. In 1990 she and her husband moved to Brutus, a resort town in Emmet County, Michigan, where she died in January 1992.