Kathy Kelly Awtt Portrait

Kathy Kelly

Peace Activist : b. 1952

“At its core, war is impoverishment. War’s genesis and ultimate end is in the poverty of our hearts. If we can realize that the world’s liberation begins within those troubled hearts, then we may yet find peace. . . . What good has ever come from the slaughter of the innocent?”

Biography

Elliott Black Award for 2006 awarded by the American Ethical Union

De Paul Center for Church/State Studies 2007 John Courtney Murray Award. April 2007

Bradford-O’Neill Medallion for Social Justice Recipient, Dominican University. September 2007

The Oscar Romero Award presented by Pax Christi Maine. October 2007

The War Resisters League (WRL) 2010 Peace Award, presented by WRL. May 2, 2010

The Chomsky Award of the Justice Studies Association. 2011

Evanston Friends Meeting Peace Award, 2013

Kathy Kelly has been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1996, she helped to found Voices in the Wilderness, a group which bears witness to the suffering which the U.S./UN-imposed sanctions visited upon the people—especially the children—of Iraq. Then, from 2005 to 2020, she worked with Voices for Creative Nonviolence, an organization that continued and expanded the work, including opposition to U.S. economic and military warfare in the Middle East and challenges to drone warfare and the building of a U.S. military base in South Korea.

Profiled by Katie Watson in Hope magazine (May/June, 2003), Kelly traced her activism to her pious childhood on the South Side of Chicago. During high school she began to read about the Holocaust. “I remember thinking,” she told Watson, “that I never ever-ever-ever want to be the person who is trying to be an innocent bystander while something that awful goes on.”

After graduating from Loyola University and while still a graduate student at Chicago Theological Seminary, she volunteered at a soup kitchen run by a Catholic Worker house. This experience enabled her to relate the ideals derived from her studies to action. As a high school English teacher as well as a committed antipoverty worker, she encouraged her students to make the same connections between theory and practice.

Kelly moved from addressing neighborhood poverty issues to advocating for of nonviolence on a global scale. For her participation in planting corn in the soil above nuclear missile silos—a symbolic act intended to demonstrate the peaceful use of land—she was sentenced to nine months in federal prison. She said she found her jail term to be a “liberating” experience because it helped her to face the fear of coercion.

Kelly is no stranger to coercion. For refusing to pay federal income taxes, her teaching salary was garnisheed. For repeated visits to Iraq to distribute toys and medicine to children, she and her associates incurred thousands of dollars in fines, along with threats of imprisonment. When she trespassed at Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the activities of the School of the Americas (now Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) in 2003, she was arrested, physically and verbally abused and sentenced to three months in federal prison. She accepts the consequences of her actions, determined to stand against what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the violence of desperate men.”

In her later years, while still a very active advocate for nonviolence, Kelly has written numerous articles for both print and online magazines and coauthored two books. She has toured the country speaking to schools, churches, and activist groups and has been awarded dozens of prizes, including the War Resisters League 2010 Peace Award, the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation’s 2015 Peace Prize, and the Veterans for Peace 2017 Gandhian Non-Violence Award.

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