Young Communist League
What organization did Dorothy Ray Healey join in 1928?
Dorothy Ray Healey Dorothy Ray Healey ( September 22 , 1914 – August 6 , 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 . Early life . Healey was born Dorothy Harriet Rosenblum in Denver to Hungarian Jewish immigrants . Her fathers family , the Rosenblums , were proud of their Hungarian background and considered themselves Austro-Hungarians rather than Jews . Her mothers 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 . When Dorothy was 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 moved with him , and she attended 19 schools before dropping out of high school . At 14 , she joined the youth section of the Workers ( Communist ) Party , the Young Workers League , and the adult Communist Party itself in 1932 , at 18 . 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 . Leader in party . Her convictions about social justice and issues of race , class , unions and labor fueled her activism . From the moment that she joined the CPUSA , 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 become the chair of the CPUSA 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 CPUSA 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 . Break with party . A critical moment for her came in 1956 , after the reading of Nikita Khrushchevs speech , On the Personality Cult and its Consequences , which revealed the crimes that Joseph Stalin committed under the USSRs 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 for the American Communist Party to support democracy and reduce its ties with the Soviets . Although many others like novelist Howard Fast left the CPUSA after the revelations of Stalins crimes , Healey tried to reform it from within . 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 which she 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 and 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 Soviet 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 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 . Later life . In 1974 , Healey joined the New American Movement , and in 1975 , she became a member of its national interim committee . Later , she supported the merger of NAM with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in 1982 , to form the Democratic Socialists of America . Through her involvement with NAM and the Democratic Socialists , she provided an important link between the activists of the 1930s and the younger generation inspired by the popular movement against the Vietnam War . She mentored hundreds of young activists , who later made contributions to the labor movement and community organizations in the Los Angeles area . Healey moved to Washington , D.C. , in 1983 to live with her son , Richard Healey , to help raise her grandchildren . She had been broadcasting 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 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 1928 . I remain a communist , as I have been all my life , albeit without a party . Death . Healey died of respiratory failure and pneumonia at age 91 at the Hebrew Home of Greater Washington in Rockville , Maryland . Legacy . Healeys extensive collection of papers and other material on the CPUSA is archived at the California State University , Long Beach library . Healey is featured in two documentaries , Seeing Red ( 1983 ) and Dorothy Healey : An American Red ( 1984 ) . Further reading . - Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman , Dorothy Healey Remembers : A Life in the American Communist Party . New York : Oxford University Press , 1990 . Reprinted in paperback as California Red : A Life in the American Communist Party . Urbana : University of Illinois Press , 1993 . - Jon Wiener , The Communist Party : An Interview with Dorothy Healey , Radical America , vol . 11 , no . 3 ( May-June 1977 ) , pp . 24-45 . External links . - Interview of Dorothy Healey , Center for Oral History Research , UCLA Library Special Collections , University of California , Los Angeles .