![]() At 18, he matriculated at Loyola, just as his father was developing cancer. He’d been raised just up the road in Skokie, Illinois, the oldest of five, and had graduated from Loyola Academy in the 1950s, when it was housed on Lake Shore Campus. ![]() The exact date that Macnamara moved to Lawndale, on Chicago’s West Side, is emblazoned on his brain: June 1, 1967. I know a lot of people when they get into their older age, they lose the optimism of their 20s. “He’s been working on open housing his entire life,” Kennedy says. “Everything was capitalized!” His enthusiasm was contagious. On the first day of her urban studies capstone class a few semesters ago, Fiona Kennedy (BA ’19) received a Macnamara handout that she described, tongue planted in cheek, as “passionate.” “He passed out a piece of paper that was 75 percent bold and italic letters,” she says. Macnamara is still hammering away at the issue five decades later, using Loyola brainpower and resources to push forward scholarship on the segregation he set out to dismantle during the Daley administration (father, not son) and its snowballing consequences.Īsk the most basic of housing policy questions and Macnamara will inundate you with sheaves of paper, of speeches delivered and meetings convened and solutions proposed. The news clippings and mementos papering his fourth floor cubicle in Cuneo Hall point to this legacy-as the chief organizer of the Contract Buyers League (CBL), an influential organization of African American homeowners that banded together in the late-1960s and early-1970s to fight racist, predatory real estate speculation on Chicago’s West and South Sides. At first glance, the visiting scholar at Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL) doesn’t project the image of a rebel, a fighter, a man willing to stir it up-over and over-for a righteous cause.īut make no mistake: Macnamara (BS ’61, MA ’66) is a Loyolan of serious conviction, and a fair housing activist of the highest order. Jack Macnamara is 83-years-old, with the gray stubble to show for it. The oxygen tube that snakes from his nose to a tank at his feet. Loyola University Chicago mourns the loss.Ĭonsider the black Sketchers. The subject of the piece, Jack Macnamara, died at his home in September 2020 from complications of COPD and congestive heart failure. Institute of Environmental SustainabilityĮditor's note: A version of this article ran in the Spring 2020 issue of Loyola magazine.Center for Student Assistance and Advocacy.
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