Kathy Kelly

In 2004 I served in prison with Kathy Kelly. A unique, strong and amazing woman who is fighting with all that she has for what she believes.

Kathy (born in 1953) of Chicago, Illinois is an American peace activist, pacifist, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness. In 1988 she was sentenced to one year in prison for planting corn on nuclear missile silo sites. Kelly served nine months of the sentence in a Lexington, KY maximum security prison.Kelly helped organize and participated in nonviolent direct action teams in Haiti (summer of 1994), Bosnia (December, 1992, August, 1993) and Iraq (Gulf Peace Team, 1991). In April 2002, she was among the first internationals to visit the Jenin camp in the West Bank.

When I met her in the spring of 2004, she served three months at Pekin federal prison for crossing the line as part of an ongoing effort to close the School of the Americas, an army military combat training school, at Fort Benning, GA. More recently, she has visited Gaza and Pakistan, writing eyewitness accounts of war’s impact on civilians.
Kathy Kelly is no stranger to coercion. For refusing to pay federal income taxes s her teaching salary was garnisheed; for repeated visits to Iraq to distribute toys and medicine to children, she and her associates have incurred thousands of dollars in fines, along with threats of imprisonment.

While reading the news that David Dellinger, one of the famous Chicago 7, had died in May 2004, I found that Kathy knew him personally and loaned me his book to read. She wrote several articles about the ladies she met while in Pekin Federal Prison which I occasionally have found on the internet. She was not your typical inmate. She certainly made an impression on me as a woman who lived life according to what she believed and was willing to give up everything for it including her salary, her freedom and even lay down her life.