Still in high school, Dorothy Ray (later Healey) was smart, energetic, and deeply concerned about poverty and injustice. Within a few years she would be organizing farmworkers in California’s central valleys. In 1930 she joined with other young Communist activists on street corner protests against unemployment in Berkeley and Oakland. She later described what she was attempting to do:

Starting with that first big unemployed protest in 1930, we understood that you had to have a daily plan of building a demonstration, and that holding a demonstration could only be part of a larger strategy. You started with small demonstrations in relief offices, or in various neighborhoods around the city, and then built up to a big central demonstration. That’s the way to turn out a mass following, so that you’re not just bringing out your own militants each time. We didn’t organize a demonstration just to express our own outrage at one or another injustice, or, worse, as an occasion for self-display. We brought new people to demonstrations as a way of increasing their knowledge of the power of collective endeavor. . . . And we could see that organization gave them a power that they hadn’t ever had before, and that perfecting that organization was our greatest, indeed our only, hope for success.