Dorothy Ray Healey
| Dorothy Ray Healey | |
|---|---|
Dorothy Healey in Los Angeles jail, 1949.
|
|
| Born |
Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum September 22, 1914 Denver, Colorado, United States |
| Died | August 6, 2006 (aged 91) Rockville, Maryland, United States |
| Occupation | Political activist |
| Political party |
Communist Party USA American Communist Party |
Dorothy Ray Healey (22 September 1914–6 August 2006) was a long-time activist in the Communist Party USA, 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. During the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, Healey was one of the leading public figures of the Communist Party in the state of California. An opponent of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and at odds with the orthodox pro-Soviet leadership of Gus Hall, Healey subsequently left the Communist Party to join the New American Movement, which merged to become part of the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982.
Healey was born Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum in Denver on September 22, 1914, to Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her father's family, the Rosenblums, were proud of their Hungarian background and considered themselves Austro-Hungarians rather than Jews. 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.
Healey was a so-called "red diaper baby," and her mother was won over to socialism as a teenager after hearing a lecture on the subject delivered by J. Stitt Wilson in 1900 and later took part in helping to establish the Communist Party of America. Her father was an apolitical traveling salesman, peddling foodstuffs to grocery stores. Her mother bore six children, one dying at birth and another dying in early childhood. She also performed multiple abortions upon herself, nearly dying of blood poisoning on one occasion, as a result of the procedure when Dorothy was a young girl.
...
Wikipedia