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RedditThe left's "greatest generation"--those tough-as-nails children of Ellis Island who built the CIO, fought Jim Crow in Manhattan and Alabama, and buried their friends in the Spanish earth--have now almost entirely passed from the American scene. It is an inestimable, heart-wrenching loss, and for many Nation readers, as well as listeners to Pacifica Radio, it is now symbolized by the death of Dorothy Ray Healey last week in Washington, DC, at age 91.
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Human Ecology
Mike Davis: As human actions change the planet in irreversable ways, will human bonds suffer irreversable damage, too?
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People Burn Here
Mike Davis: Illegal immigrants are the invisible victims of the California wildfires.
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Denial in the Desert
Mike Davis: Abrupt climate change is rapidly turning the American West into a desert. But a culture in denial continues rampant suburbanization, fueled by the delusion that our water supply is inexhaustible.
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Car Bombs: WMDs the Surge Can't Stop
Mike Davis: The favored weapon of the ill-armed and underfunded is the one weapon of mass destruction that the Bush Administration has totally ignored.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Dorothy Healey
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Mike Davis: An appreciation of one of the last members of the left's "greatest generation," known for her physical courage, warmth and intelligence, who spent a lifetime arguing eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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Who Is Killing New Orleans?
Mike Davis: Mayor-appointed commissions and experts, mostly white and Republican, propose to radically shrink and reshape a majority-black and Democratic city.
The daughter of immigrant Debsian Socialists, one of her earliest memories was being bounced on Big Bill Haywood's knee. When she was fourteen (in 1928) she joined the Young Communist League, and a few years later quit high school to agitate the unemployed in downtown Oakland, trading prom night for a soapbox and jail cell.
This tiny woman's physical courage, like her warmth, intelligence, and wit, was legendary: whether facing up to shotgun-toting vigilantes as a farm-workers' organizer in the late 1930s; defying her prosecutors as an indicted Communist leader in the 1950s; defending the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles the 1960s; or telling Gus Hall where to shove it in the early 1970s, when she was finally expelled from the CPUSA for her democratic-socialist heresies.
But neither the FBI nor the apparatchiks couldn't take her off the air, and for decades more Dorothy used her soapbox on KPFK (Los Angeles) and then WPFW (Washington DC) to argue eloquently for socialism, feminism and peace.
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