Biography
Kathy Kelly is 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 has been arrested more than 60 times.
2014–2015 custody episode verified October 12, 2026: Kelly's original sentencing account documents June 1, 2014 arrest and December 10 sentencing. Medea Benjamin's January 26 interview report confirms the sentence began January 23, 2015. In her later first-person interview, read in the browser, Kelly explicitly identifies April 21 as the day she walked out of Lexington's prison. This actual endpoint is distinguished from the anticipated April 23 date. The separate episode replaces neither the earlier prosecutions nor the later case; the false uninterrupted aggregate duration was removed.
Correction of an unsupported death entry
The former January 9, 2025 death date and matching biography sentence were incorrect and have been removed. World BEYOND War’s February 28, 2026 account of its conversation with Kathy Kelly explicitly dates the interview to February 27, 2026 and identifies her as the organization’s board president. DePaul University’s March 31, 2026 announcement independently identifies the same Chicago peace activist and Voices in the Wilderness co-founder as its 2026 Berrigan-McAlister Award recipient. These are activities after the falsely stored death date, not an obituary. Her birth date is unchanged.
The January 2015 Gangjeong Village Story newsletter, page 2 photo caption, also corroborates that Kelly began her three-month sentence at FMC Lexington on January 23, 2015. That admission date is already correctly recorded; the caption supplies no release date and does not alter other custody periods.
The November 9, 1988 Missouri Peace Planting participants’ letter individually states Kathy Kelly completed thirty days in Cass County Jail and then bonded out. A distinct initial pretrial row records this completed actual interval, with admission and bond release known only to 1988 YEAR precision. The legacy row combines1988,2004and2014prosecutions; it remains unmeasured and may overlap this1988 campaign. Its old arrest date is not silently transplanted into the new row. The new thirty-day value is this documented initial stay only, not a complete lifetime or campaign imprisonment total; later bond freedom and sentence imprisonment remain separate.
