CIW’s Lucas Benitez: “My colleagues and I are here today from Florida… in the company of so many distinguished champions of this great democracy, because Mrs. Kennedy knew it takes all of us, from farmworkers to presidents, to defend the human rights she held so dear.”
CIW’s Greg Asbed: “Her embrace of our work in Immokalee connected us to history, to the history of the civil rights movement, to the history of the farmworker movement, to the history of all who have fought to hold this country accountable to its great promise of equal justice and equal rights.”
On October 10th, Ethel Skakel Kennedy passed away peacefully, surrounded by the love of her famously large family, at the age of 96.
One week later, on October 16th, over 1,000 friends, family, and admirers — including President Biden, former Presidents Obama and Clinton, artists Stevie Wonder and Sting, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers — gathered in Washington, DC’s spectacular Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle to celebrate Mrs. Kennedy’s extraordinary life.
Mrs. Kennedy lived a life true to the tenets of her faith, defined by an unwavering commitment to social justice that stretched across two centuries. From the movement to expand fundamental civil and human rights to all Americans in the 1960s — a turbulent decade that claimed the life of her husband, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy — to the struggle to protect and preserve our country’s fragile democracy today, Mrs. Kennedy never shied from joining in the fight to make the country, and the world, a kinder, more equal, more humane place.
Indeed, over two decades ago, Mrs. Kennedy joined the CIW in our fight against exploitation and abuse in the fields, when she awarded three CIW leaders — Lucas Benitez, Julia Gabriel, and Romeo Ramirez — the 2003 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for their groundbreaking efforts to end modern-day slavery and bring abusive farm bosses to justice. Mrs. Kennedy presented the award to the trio of CIW leaders at a gala ceremony in the US Senate, and then promptly joined us in the streets of DC at a protest outside a Taco Bell restaurant (right).
It would be the first of many, many times that Mrs. Kennedy joined us in the streets, from her 2006 visit to Immokalee to kick off the “RFK Memorial Poverty Tour: A Tour for Social and Economic Justice”, to her annual appearances with hundreds of farmworkers and their allies on marches along glamorous Worth Avenue in the heart of her winter home of Palm Beach, Florida, calling on Wendy’s — and her fellow Palm Beach resident, billionaire investor Nelson Peltz — to join the Fair Food Program.
But perhaps the greatest highlight of the past two decades of Mrs. Kennedy’s tireless solidarity came in 2012, outside Publix headquarters in Lakeland, Florida. In a heartfelt callback to her role in supporting Cesar Chavez’s historic hunger strike for farmworker rights in 1968, in which Mrs. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy joined Chavez for the breaking of his 25-day fast, Mrs. Kennedy joined dozens of farmworkers and their allies in ending their own fast calling on Publix to join the Fair Food Program (below) in an emotional and unforgettable ceremony:
