Dorothy Ray Healey

Dorothy Ray Healey (September 22, 1914 – August 6, 2006) was a long-time activist in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) 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 African Americans as factory and field workers.

During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Healey was one of the leading public figures of the CPUSA in the state of California. An opponent of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and at odds with the orthodox pro-Soviet leadership of Gus Hall, Healey subsequently left the CPUSA to join the New American Movement (NAM), which merged to become part of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982. She became a national vice-chair of the DSA.

Early life Healey was born Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum in Denver to Hungarian Jewish immigrants on September 22, 1914. Her mother's family, on the other hand, were Orthodox Jews, with her maternal grandfather serving as a shokhet, a supervisor of the ritual slaughter of animals to ensure that they were kosher. At the behest of the YCL she took a job in a peach processing factory, making 12 cents an hour and hiding when government labor inspectors came looking for underage workers. It was there where she gained her first experience as an organizer.

Break with party In 1956, after the reading of Nikita Khrushchev's speech, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which revealed the crimes that Joseph Stalin committed as leader of the USSR, she became outspoken in her insistence for the CPUSA to support democracy and reduce its ties with the Soviets. She stayed in the party until 1973, when she resigned in a dispute with CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall over issues of orthodoxy, to which she could no longer conform. The end came when she could no longer hold her tongue and publicly criticized the Party.

Healey moved to Washington, D.C., in 1983 to live with her son, Richard Healey, to help raise her grandchildren. She broadcast on Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles from 1959, and in Washington, she and Richard co-hosted "Dialogue," an hour-long public affairs show on WPFW on Wednesday mornings. Healey joined the D.C. Statehood Party after living in the city.

Death Healey died of respiratory failure and pneumonia at age 91 on August 6, 2006 at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland. Healey is featured in two documentaries, Seeing Red (1983) and Dorothy Healey: An American Red (1984).