Ethel Kennedy, human rights activist and widow of Robert F. Kennedy, dies at 96

(CNN) — Ethel Kennedy, the widow of former US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a longtime human rights activist, died Thursday, her family said. She was 96.

Former Massachusetts Rep. Joe Kennedy III announced the news of his grandmother’s passing on X. Ethel Kennedy was hospitalized after suffering a stroke last week.

“Along with a lifetime’s work in social justice and human rights, our mother leaves behind nine children, 34 grandchildren, and 24 great-grandchildren, along with numerous nieces and nephews, all of whom love her dearly,” the former congressman wrote in a post. “She was a devout Catholic and a daily communicant, and we are comforted in knowing she is reunited with the love of her life, our father, Robert F. Kennedy; her children David and Michael; her daughter-in-law Mary; her grandchildren Maeve and Saoirse; and her great-grandchildren Gideon and Josie.”

Marrying into one of the United States’ most influential political families, Kennedy supported her husband through his successful Senate campaign and later through his 1968 presidential run, which ended with his assassination months into the campaign.

Her husband was tragically gunned down at a Los Angeles hotel just after winning California’s Democratic primary. The attack, which came five years after Robert F. Kennedy’s brother, former President John F. Kennedy, was shot and killed, left five others wounded and rattled a nation that had already been shaken from multiple assassinations; civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed roughly two months before. Photographs of the shooting aftermath show Ethel Kennedy, leaning over her husband with her hands over his chest as he bled onto the floor. She was three months pregnant with her youngest daughter, Rory, at the time.

In the decades following her husband’s death, Ethel Kennedy emerged as an environmental and human rights activist in her own right, founding the nonprofit organization Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights to champion the causes her late husband pushed for.

Her activism took her across the country and around the world, from marching with Cesar Chavez in support of the Farm Workers movement to confronting Kenyan dictator Daniel Arap Moi with her daughter, Kerry, by her side in 1989. She received the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Barack Obama in 2014. Her activism continued well into the last decades of her life. In 2018, Kennedy joined a hunger strike to protest the then-Trump administration’s separation of families at the US-Mexico border.

“Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she said in a statement at the time.

Most recently, Ethel Kennedy’s family was caught in political strife, when her oldest son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran for president in 2024, initially as a Democrat and later as an independent. Members of the staunchly Democratic family shunned his campaign, calling it “dangerous” and noting their frustration, sadness. RFK Jr. suspended his campaign in August and endorsed former President Donald Trump.

Born to a large family in Chicago in 1928, Ethel Kennedy grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. She met Robert F. Kennedy in 1945 through his sister, Jean Kennedy, on a ski trip. The couple married in 1950 and had 11 children.

Ethel Kennedy’s life, like that of many of her family members, was marked by a series of tragedies. Her father, George Skakel, a wealthy coal magnate, and mother, Ann Skakel, were killed in an airplane accident in 1955. Her brother died in a plane crash in 1966. Her son David died in 1984 from an accidental drug overdose, and another son Michael died in a skiing accident in 1997. Her granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill died of an accidental overdose in 2019, and another granddaughter, Maeve Kennedy Townsend McKean, drowned with her 8-year old son in a canoe accident in 2020. 

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This story has been updated with additional information.

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CNN’s Paul LeBlanc and Tom Foreman contributed to this report.