Biography
Kathy Kelly was an American peace activist nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize and one of the most arrested anti-war organizers of her generation. Raised on Chicago's South Side and trained at Loyola University Chicago and the Chicago Theological Seminary, she became active in Catholic Worker circles in the 1970s and built her organizing around tax resistance, the Plowshares movement, and direct intervention in war zones.
In 1988 she and others planted corn on the silo of a Minuteman II nuclear missile in Missouri as an act of symbolic disarmament. She was sentenced to one year in federal prison and served nine months at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky (the women's facility). In 2004 she was sentenced to three months at FCI Pekin for crossing the line at the U.S. Army School of the Americas / WHINSEC at Fort Benning, Georgia. In 2014 she was sentenced to three months at FMC Lexington for crossing the line at Whiteman Air Force Base in protest of U.S. drone warfare.
In 1996 she co-founded Voices in the Wilderness, which over the next seven years organized roughly seventy delegations to bring medicine to Iraqi children in open defiance of UN/U.S. economic sanctions. She traveled to Iraq more than 26 times, including remaining in Baghdad during the opening days of the 1991 and 2003 U.S. bombing campaigns. After Voices in the Wilderness was fined $20,000 by the U.S. Treasury Department for sanctions violations, the campaign closed in 2003 and was succeeded by Voices for Creative Nonviolence. She was arrested more than 60 times across her life. She died on January 9, 2025.
