Dorothy Healey, a onetime labor organizer, civil rights activist and Marxist radio commentator who was chairwoman of the Southern California district of the Communist Party USA from the late 1940s through the 1960s, has died. She was 91.
Healey, dubbed "the Red Queen of Los Angeles" by headline writers during her heyday, died Sunday of pneumonia in the Greater Washington Hebrew Home, said her son, Richard. She had been a resident of Washington, D.C., since 1983.
The diminutive Healey, who stood just under 5 feet tall and once wore a pendant that pictured a clenched fist raised as a symbol of solidarity and militancy, fought a lifelong battle against what she called the oppression of the middle class and minorities.
"She was a heartfelt revolutionary of her time," Donna Wilkinson, the widow of national civil liberties leader Frank Wilkinson, told The Times on Monday. "She was always so fiercely partisan for working people. Yes, of course, she cared about war and peace and women's issues, but she was always concerned about working people."
The daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Healey was born in Denver on Sept. 22, 1914. Her father was a traveling salesman, and the family moved from Denver to California when she was 6. Constantly on the move because of her father's work selling smoked meat and cheese, Healey attended 19 schools. Her father died when she was 16.
Healey, whose Socialist mother was a founding member of the Communist Party in America, joined the Young Communist League in 1928, when she was 14.
"I joined the Young Communist League out of a feeling of hate and love," she told an audience at Golden West College in Huntington Beach in 1977. "I hated the system that reduced all humans to a feeling of total helplessness ... of fear over what each day would bring.
"I loved the humans who lived under these [conditions] and I respected their potential."
She was arrested for the first time at 14 -- for selling the Daily Worker newspaper and making a speech on skid row in Oakland.
At 16, she dropped out of school and helped organize a union and a strike at a cannery in San Jose, where she worked.
By 1933, she was organizing agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley. By the end of the decade, she was international vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organization's Cannery, Agriculture and Packing House Workers union.
