Cirilo mcsween biography

Cirilo McSween came to the United States from Panama to run track at the University of Illinois and went on to become a business and civil rights leader who was one of the first African-Americans to take a seat at the insurance industry’s elite “Million Dollar Round Table.”

Mr. McSween, 82, died of multiple myeloma on Wednesday, Nov. 5, in a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., where he had gone for treatment, said his daughter Veronica. He lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

Born in Panama City, where his father was in the import-export business and his mother made dresses, Mr. McSween was a young track star on the national team before coming north to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There he was a Big Ten champion in the 440-yard dash in the early 1950s and received a bachelor’s degree in business.

He settled in Chicago and broke into the insurance business with New York Life, no easy task for an African-American at the time. From an office on East 35th Street in Bronzeville, he doggedly built a clientele of policy-holders

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