August 28, 2013, marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech. The Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University Chicago, honors this occasion with a photo of Margaret “Peggy” Roach and other members of St. Dorothy’s Parish, Chicago, Illinois, at the historic gathering.
Peggy graduated from Mundelein College in 1949 and while a student, honed her writing and leadership skills. Themes of Catholic social justice echo throughout Peggy’s life. She worked tirelessly both nationally and at the local Chicago level on social justice concerns such as civil rights, ecumenism, housing equality, Vatican II, women’s issues, and economic equality. As part of this work, Peggy participated in countless civil rights marches and conferences in the 1960s.
In Chicago, she spent 35 years fighting alongside Monsignor John Egan against predatory lending and displacement of the city’s poor through urban renewal, for which she received a standing ovation at his funeral in 2001. When she retired from DePaul University in 2001, a news item from the University called Peggy “one of the women pioneers of the civil rights movement.”
Read more about Peggy in her 2006 obituary from the Chicago Tribune.