Biography
Sister Ardeth Platte OP was a Dominican nun of the Grand Rapids Dominicans whose six decades of social-justice organizing began in Saginaw, Michigan, where she helped organize against urban poverty and educational inequity, and culminated in her years as one of the most arrested anti-nuclear activists in the United States. She lived in community at Jonah House in Baltimore for the last twenty-five years of her life with longtime partners-in-action Carol Gilbert and the late Philip Berrigan.
On October 6, 2002, with Sister Carol Gilbert and Sister Jackie Hudson, she cut through perimeter fencing and walked onto the launching pad of an N-8 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile silo near New Raymer, Colorado, splashed her own blood on the silo cover in the shape of a cross, and hammered on the silo with household hammers — an act intended as a literal beating of swords into plowshares, in the symbolic tradition of the Plowshares movement co-founded by Philip Berrigan in 1980. The action, called the Sacred Earth and Space Plowshares II, took place three weeks before the Bush administration's congressional vote on Iraq. The three were arrested at the silo and charged with sabotage and depredation of property.
A federal jury in Denver convicted them in April 2003. On July 25, 2003, U.S. District Judge Robert E. Blackburn sentenced Sister Ardeth — then 67 years old — to 41 months in federal prison, the longest sentence given to any of the three. She served at FCI Danbury in Connecticut, where she was housed alongside, and later widely identified as the inspiration for, the character Sister Jane Ingalls in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. She was released in November 2005 and continued anti-nuclear organizing until her death in her sleep at Jonah House on September 30, 2020.
