Kathy Kelly’s Anti-war Crusade Has Taken Her To Hot Spots Around The World-from Midwest Missile Silos To Baghdad Bomb Shelters.

By Don Terry
Published October 17, 2004
Chicago Tribune Magazine

If jailbirds were listed in an avian guide, Kathy Kelly would rate a special entry for “Dove.” She has been arrested more than 60 times at home and abroad in her remarkable journey from St. Daniel the Prophet parish on the Southwest Side to the forefront of the American peace movement.

Though nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize, she is not well known beyond the world of anti-war activists and jailers. Writer Studs Terkel, the chronicler of quiet heroes, calls her “The Pilgrim.”

“She has visited more countries, cities and small towns not listed in Baedeker’s guide than anyone I have ever known,” Terkel writes in his latest book of oral history, “Hope Dies Last.” “Her hosts have been the men, women and children whose homes have been under constant fire. Her pilgrimages have one purpose: to reveal the lives of war’s innocent victims.”

Her sometimes lonely path was set a long time ago at St. Paul-Kennedy High School, though she didn’t realize it at the time. She sat in the dark with tears streaming down her cheeks as she watched a film about the Holocaust called “Night and Fog,” Afterward, she felt the stirrings of resolve, as she would tell Terkel many years later. “I never, ever,” she said, “want to be sitting on the sidelines or sitting on my hands in the bleachers and just watch some unspeakable evil happen.”