Dorothy Ray Healey

Dorothy Ray Healey (1914–2006) 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.

Biography

Early life

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 they were kosher.