Ethel Kennedy, widow of the late Robert F. Kennedy Sr., was remembered Wednesday for lifting an emerging Coalition of Immokalee workers out of obscurity when she came to the dusty tomato fields to understand and champion their fights over the decades.
She participated in hunger strikes, boycotts and marches. Kennedy died last week in Boston after being hospitalized a week earlier when she suffered a stroke. She was 96.
Lucas Benitez, Laura Germino and Greg Asbed, the three founders of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, were among a superstar list of politicians, singers Sting, Stevie Wonder and Kenney Chesney and friends and family who gathered in the Cathedral of St Mathew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. to remember and eulogize the Kennedy family matriarch.
Kennedy was remembered for raising her 11 children on her own after her husband’s death.
In 1968 she founded what is now known as Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. Just as she did when she married Robert, Kennedy spent the next seven decades championing various politicians, political causes and advocating for social justice, human rights, environmental protection and poverty reduction.
"Ethel saw the promise in our early efforts to bring brutal farm bosses to justice when no one else did," Benitez told the crowd of more than 1,000 through an interpreter and coalition co-founder Germino. "...Lifting us up from Immokalee's dusty streets to celebrate our efforts in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Senate."
Kennedy brought influential friends like John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO and Sen. Bernie Sanders to Immokalee to join the coalition's fight.
As Kennedy became older, she continued to participate in the coalition's marches, though now with Benitez pushing her wheelchair through the streets of Palm Beach where she had a winter home.
She used her power and persuasion to convince McDonald's executives to join the Fair Food Program, a signature human rights program of the coalition.
She protested and drew attention to another Palm Beach winter resident, Nelson Peltz, the chairman of board of Wendy's. Peltz and Wendy's are considered one of the big hold-outs refusing to join the Fair Food Program.
"Senora Ethel, a true force of nature will never leave us," Benitez and Germino said. "You will never really leave us because you will always live on in our hearts and in our memories, in Immokalee and anywhere a farmworker harvests the food that feeds our nation."
Asbed called Kennedy a true force of nature, changing the world with an uncommon grace. He said her greatest joy, her power came in helping others find and amplify their own voices.
"In sharing her power with those of the rest of the world considered powerless 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.
“...Among her many loves, Ethel Kennedy loved people who do hard work. And workers across the fields love you, too, Ethel and they will carry you in their hearts always and they will continue to we continue our work — more equal your work — to make this world a more kinder, more equal, more human place. Thank you.”
in 2003, Kennedy chose chose the coalition to be the 2003 recipient of a RFK International Human Rights award.
Joining the Coalition of Immokalee founders in eulogizing Kennedy were presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden.