Dorothy Ray Healey

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Dorothy Ray Healey (September 22, 1914August 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. She was born Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum in Denver on Sept. 22, 1914, to Hungarian Jewish immigrants. A "red diaper baby," her mother was a socialist who took part in creating the American Communist Party. Her father was a traveling salesman, peddling foodstuffs to grocery stores, and at the age of six, the family relocated to Los Angeles, where she would eventually become known as the "Red Queen of Los Angeles". As her father moved about the West, his family movied with him, and she attended 19 schools before dropping out of high school. She worked in a peach processing factory, making 12 cents an hour and hiding when government labor inspectors came looking for underage workers. At 14, she joined the Young Communist League and, at 18, the CP-USA.

Her convictions about social justice and issues of race, class, unions and labor fueled her activism. From the moment she joined the CP-USA, she was a true believer. "We knew with absolute conviction that we were part of a vanguard that was destined to lead an American working class to a socialist revolution," she once said. Healey became a successful labor organizer and rose to becomed the chair of the CP-USA in Southern California. Eventually, she joined the national Party leadership. She mentored many young communists and labor activists.

In the 1950s, she and 14 other Californians were convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to advocate the forceful overthrow of the government. She faced five years in prison and a $10,000 fine before the Supreme Court overturned the conviction. In the 1960s, she again faced imprisonment and a hefty fine under a piece of McCarthy-era legislation known as the McCarran Act, when she and others refused to register as agents of a foreign government (the logic being that the CP-USA was under the control of the Soviet Union). In 1965, the Supreme Court reconsidered an earlier decision and found the registration provision to be in violation of the Fifth Amendment guarantee against self-incrimination.

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.

A critical moment for her came in 1956, after the reading of Nikita Khrushchev's speechOn the Personality Cult and its Consequences, and the crimes that Josef Stalin committed under the USSR's one-party system.

"The speech went on for four hours, and I was reduced to tears after about 30 minutes," she said. "Fact after fact of monstrous things had happened. It was a relentless account. But I believed it. There was no questioning its authenticity." From that point, she was outspoken in her insistence that the American Communist Party support democracy and reduce its ties with the USSR.

Although many like novelist Howard Fast left the CP-USA after the revelations of Stalin's crimes, Healey tried to reform it from within and called for its democratization and greater independence from the USSR. Her story is told in a book she wrote with historian Maurice Isserman, "Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party" (1990).

In the book, Healey revealed "the aspirations, commitment, illusions -- and, ultimately, disillusionment -- of a generation of young Communists" who joined the movement before and during the Great Depression. She, as they, had to deal with and "the Party [being] reduced to a remnant of its former strength through the battering it received in the McCarthy era and through its own sectarian mistakes."

She resigned from her leadership post in 1968, after Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev ordered Soviety and Warsaw Pact troops to crush the democratic socialist movement in Czechoslovakia. She stayed in the party until 1973, when she resigned in a dispute with CP-USA General Secretary Gus Hall over issues of orthodoxy, which she could no longer conform to. The end came when she could no longer hold her tongue and publicly criticized the Party,

In 1983, Healey moved to Washington, D.C. in 1983 to live with her son, Richard Healey, to help raise her grandchildren. She had been boradcasting on Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles since 1959, and in Washington, she and Richard co-hosted "Dialogue," an hour-long public affairs show on WPFW on Wednesday mornings.

Dorothy Ray Healey was married to, in her own words, "three good men": Lon Sherman, Don Healey and Phillip Connelly. All three marriages ended in divorce. She died of respiratory failure and pneumonia on August 6, 2006 at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland.

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.

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 in 1928I remain a communist, as I have been all my life, albeit without a party." (Source: Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times at [1])

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 0-19-503819-3

A collection of Healey's papers and other material is kept at the California State University, Long Beach library. [2]

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

[edit] External link

  • Obituary (Los Angeles Times - registration required)