And a memorial service is scheduled for this Sunday in Washington DC for Dorothy Ray Healey. The longtime labor organizer, civil rights activist and radio commentator died last week at the age of 91. From the late 1940s through the 1960s she was chairwoman of the Southern California district of the Communist Party USA. She was also a longtime programmer on Pacifica Radio, first at KPFK in Los Angeles and later at WPFW in Washington. In 1951, she and 14 other Californians were indicted and convicted under the Smith Act for conspiring to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence. Although she was sentenced to five years in prison, her sentence was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1957. In 1962 Dorothy Healey explained why she became a communist.

• Dorothy Healey: I was convinced that it wasn’t enough simply to view with horror the exploitation of man by man and the horrors that resulted from that — the injustice, the bigotry, the intolerance, the insecurity, the unemployment — that one had to get at the basic cause of why. And I became convinced that the reason was the existence of an economic system that had within it all of these built-in characteristics that provided the horrors of society that I so detested.”