Kathy Kelly

Kathy Kelly (born 1952) is an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of Voices in the Wilderness, and, until the campaign closed in 2020, a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

As part of peace team work in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US–Iraq wars.

Kelly was born in 1952 in Chicago's Garfield Ridge neighborhood to parents Frank and Catherine Kelly.

She attended St. Paul-Kennedy "shared-time" high school, which split her days between a Catholic institution where she was given the writings of Daniel Berrigan and Martin Luther King Jr. to read alongside biblical texts, and a desegregating public school where interracial violence was common.

She obtained her BA from Loyola University Chicago working a succession of night jobs to help cover tuition, including a stint on a meat-packing factory line which inspired her to become a lifelong vegetarian.

During these years she remembers being deeply moved by Alain Resnais' Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, by a lecture by Vietnam War activist Tom Cornell, and by the activist scripture writings of William Stringfellow.

After college in 1978, and while working on her MA in Religious Education (at Chicago Theological Seminary,) Kelly began volunteer work in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood (where she still resides), working at a local soup kitchen with a circle of activists, including future SOAW founder Roy Bourgeois, centered around Chicago's Francis of Assisi House, a homeless shelter in the Catholic Worker tradition.

In 1980 she began work as a teacher of religion at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School.

In 1982 she married fellow activist Karl Meyer and began a lifetime of "war tax resistance" (refusal to pay federal taxes on pacifist grounds), asking her employer to reduce her salary beneath the taxable income.

A Jesuit professional development grant enabled her to travel to Nicaragua in 1985 and participate in a fast led by Foreign Minister Miguel D'Escoto against US-backed Contra activity.

Returning to the US, she left St. Ignatius in 1986 in order to focus on activism including two years as a teacher in Uptown's Prologue High School serving marginalized low-income youth.

In August 1988, Kelly participated in the Missouri Peace Planting, trespassing at a nuclear missile silo near Kansas City, Missouri to plant corn on it.

For this action she served nine months in a Lexington, KY minimum security prison.

In 1990 she joined the Gulf Peace Team, a delegation assembled to protest the imminent Persian Gulf War and spent the first 14 days of the air war encamped on the Iraq-Saudi border before evacuation to Baghdad and then Amman in Jordan where she helped coordinate relief work.

Kelly helped organize and participated in several nonviolent direct action teams in war zones outside Iraq: Bosnia in December 1992 and August 1993, and Haiti in the summer of 1994.

In 1993, after her return from Bosnia, Kelly became a full-time caregiver to her father, assisted (until his death in 2000) by a network of former Iraq peace team members now living in and around her and her father's shared Uptown apartment.

She and Meyer divorced in 1994 although they have continued as friends.

In late 1995 Kelly and several other of these activists resolved to form Voices in the Wilderness (VIW), a campaign to end the US/UN sanctions regime against Iraq.

In a January 1996 letter, the activists wrote then US Attorney General Janet Reno a letter declaring an intention to travel to Iraq with food and medicine in violation of the sanctions.

A return letter threatened the participants with separate 12-year prison sentences and fines of one million dollars each.

Between 1996 and 2003 Voices organized over seventy delegations to Iraq bringing food and medicine directly to Iraqi citizens in deliberate violation of both UN-imposed economic sanctions and US law.

Participants refused to pay fines for these actions but instead solicited matching donations from supporters for supplies to distribute on repeat visits.

Members sought to raise awareness at home with demonstrations, media appearances, and personal accounts of their delegation work.

Kelly went on 26 of these delegations.

Voices work was chiefly focused on, but not exclusive to, Iraq: in April 2002 Kelly and her fellow activists, walking on foot and engaging in repeated negotiations with Israeli Defense Force officers, became the first internationals to visit the Jenin refugee camp after learning, while on peace team work in the West Bank, of the recent attack there and what she described as its heavy civilian toll after observing it first-hand during her time at West Bank.

In March 2003, Kelly returned to Baghdad shortly before the start of the Iraq War, witnessing the Shock and Awe bombardment, and remaining for two months.

She narrated her experiences of bombardment for Westerners via antiwar and religious witness websites.

When the air war gave way to a ground invasion, she and other activists were present to greet arriving US soldiers with dates and water.

Voices in the Wilderness was fined $20,000 by the US Treasury in 2003, which it refused to pay; it was "charged with exporting unspecified goods or services, which a spokesman said was related to delivering medicines to Iraq several years ago."

In November of that same year Kelly joined 43 other activists crossing illegally into the Fort Benning US Army base as part of the annual School of the Americas Watch vigil, and incurred a three-month prison sentence which she carried out in Illinois' Pekin Prison in 2004, to which she was seen off by longtime friend Studs Terkel.

A judge affirmed the fine in late 2004.

Her experiences in prison resulted in many of the essays collected in her book Other Lands Have Dreams, published in 2005.

In 2005, Kelly announced that Voices in the Wilderness disbanded, and the group Voices for Creative Nonviolence was formed to continue challenging US military and economic warfare against Iraq and other countries.

In the summer of 2006, Kelly and other Voices activists traveled to Lebanon during the 2006 Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah, reporting from the capital city of Beirut and then, once the cease-fire was declared, from damaged villages in the country's south.

In 2007 VCNV initiated the "Occupation Project", in which activists in 25 states occupied the offices of 39 Senators and congressional Representatives whom they regarded as insufficiently committed to defunding the Iraq war.

From 2009 to 2019, her activism and writing focused on Afghanistan, Yemen, and Gaza, along with domestic protests against US drone policy.

She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of US military bombardment and inmates of US prisons.

With Voices for Creative Nonviolence, Kelly carried on extensive activism outside of Iraq, most recently focusing on solidarity work in Kabul alongside a community of Afghan peace activists, support for the protest movement against naval base construction on South Korea's Jeju Island, and multiple visits to Gaza, where Kelly waited out Israel's 2009 "Cast Lead" operation in a region of Gaza along its border with Egypt which was sustaining heavy bombardment.

Among numerous fasts and peace walks, Kelly has joined protests at several domestic USAF drone bases, incurring a June 2014 arrest with charges threatening a six-month prison sentence.

Shortly after formation, VCNV began sending delegations, several involving Kelly, to interview Iraqi refugees in countries neighboring Iraq, especially Jordan.