Dorothy Healey

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Dorothy Ray Healey (September 22, 1914–August 6, 2006) was a long-time activist in the American Communist Party, from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In the 1930s, she was one of the first union leaders to advocate for the rights of Chicanos and blacks as factory and field workers.

In 1956 Healey read the "Secret Speech" of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, and the crimes that Josef Stalin committed under the USSR's one-party system. From that point, she was outspoken in her insistence that the American Communist Party support democracy and reduce its ties with the USSR.

Eventually, Healey left the party to become one of the leaders of the New American Movement in the 1970s. Later, she supported the merger of that organization with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1982 to form the Democratic Socialists of America.

She once wrote: "My hatred of capitalism, which degrades and debases humans, is as intense now as it was when I joined the Young Communist League... I remain a communist, as I have been all my life, albeit without a party."

Dorothy Healey: An American Red is a 52-minute documentary about her life. She also wrote a memoir, with the help of Maurice Isserman, titled Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party. ISBN 0195038193

A collection of Healey's papers and other material is kept at the California State University, Long Beach library. [1]

She died of pneumonia at the age of 91 on August 6, 2006 in Washington, D.C..