Roxanne Mae Rogers, retired educator and political activist, died peacefully on the 6th of October 2026 at Blue Ridge Care, which is located on the same site in which she was born in 1932 at Winchester Memorial Hospital in Winchester, Virginia.

Born and raised in Winchester, Roxanne was the daughter of E. Clay Rogers, a cattleman and entrepreneur, and his wife Winifred Marjorie Whitacre Rogers, a graduate of Shepherd College who taught first grade at Gainesboro School for more than 30 years.

Roxanne’s childhood was spent on the family’s 200-acre registered beef cattle farm in Frederick County. She was an Apple Blossom Princess in 1949 and a lifelong proud alumnus of James Wood High School where she graduated with the Class of 1951. At Madison College (now known as James Madison University) in Harrisonburg, Virginia, Roxanne was a member of Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority. She majored in education and returned to James Wood High School to do her student teaching. In 1955, she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Education from Madison College.

In July 1954, Roxanne married John Calvin Thompson, Jr., a young cadet in the Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (AFROTC) at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Her husband was subsequently stationed in Taegu, South Korea with a front-line tour above Seoul flying the single-seat fighter-bomber F-84G Thunderjet for over 100 missions.
After her husband’s return to the States, Roxanne moved with John to Ithaca, New York where John completed his Ph.D. at Cornell University and went on to became an agricultural economist and a tenured professor at Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Roxanne and John raised their three children, Mark, Kent, and Tamara in Ithaca and then purchased a 100-acre farm in Lansing, New York.

During her four decades in Ithaca, Roxanne taught with the New York State Division of Youth at South Lansing Center, a state-operated school for adolescent girls, where she educated and counseled young inner-city women. Roxanne was trained in Transactional Analysis (TA), a post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory of therapy, which she utilized to conduct numerous workshops with adolescents and adults.

Roxanne was equally engaged in the pursuit of female equality and justice. She worked extensively on the struggle for women’s reproductive rights and sat on the Board of Directors for Planned Parenthood of Tompkins County. When her eldest son revealed his homosexuality, Roxanne immediately joined PFLAG (Parents and Families of Lesbians and Gays) and marched down Fifth Avenue during the annual New York City Pride March.

For more than ten years, Roxanne team-taught with her husband at Tompkins County Community College and Cortland BOCES in a state-mandated Drinking Driver Program (DDP) as part of New York State’s efforts to lessen the incidence of alcohol-induced automobile accidents.
Upon her relocation to Winchester in 1997, Roxanne continued her political activism by working as a poll worker and volunteering for various candidates during their campaigns for higher office.

She was a dedicated grassroots organizer who managed campaign headquarters, coordinated field operations, and devoted countless hours to voter outreach through door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, text banking, and handwritten postcards. Roxanne was a member of the Virginia Retired Teachers Association, Blue Ridge Democratic Women, and a founding member of the Golden Girls, a politically-engaged group of progressive women who brainstormed monthly and canvassed voters. In 2018. Roxanne was presented with The Malcolm Baldwin Volunteer Award by Wexton for Congress.

Survivors include Roxanne’s long-term partner Jerry White of Winchester; her three children Mark Thompson, Kent Thompson, and Tamara Thompson; her sons-in-law Robert Doyle and Kevin Sullivan; and her three grandchildren, Brendan Sullivan, Kendall Sullivan, and Jonathan Sullivan.

A memorial service will be held for Roxanne on Saturday, October 17, 2026 at 11am at Omps Funeral Home, Amherst Chapel.

In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Roxanne Rogers & Winifred Whitacre Rogers Scholarship at Frederick County Educational Foundation (FCEF), PO Box 3887, Winchester VA 22604.