Ethel Kennedy, the human rights activist and widow of former US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, died on Thursday, October 10, 2024, after suffering a stroke last week. She was 96 years old.

Kennedy was born Ethel Skakel on April 11, 1928, in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the Bronx and earned a Bachelor’s degree from Manhattanville College.

She met Robert in 1945, the couple was married five years later, and they had 11 children together. Ethel supported Robert during his Senate campaign and presidential run in 1968, that ended with his assassination. He was shot at a hotel in Los Angeles after winning California’s Democratic primary, and Ethel was with him when it happened.

After her husband’s death, Kennedy became a well known human rights and environmental activist. She founded the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights nonprofit organization to pursue the causes that she and her husband championed. She marched with Cesar Chavez for the Farm Workers movement and worked with the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Project, a community development corporation in Brooklyn.

Kennedy continued to fight for her beliefs into the later years of her life. In 2016 she marched for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a farm workers’ group) for increased wages for field workers. Two years later she joined a hunger strike to protest the separation of families at the US-Mexico border during the Trump administration.

President Reagan gave her the Robert F. Kennedy medal in 1981, and President Obama awarded the President Medal of Freedom – the highest civilian honor in the US – in 2014.