Lea Heine was born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1911. As a child she personally experienced the inflation and impoverishment of post-World War I Germany. Often unhappy, she lived with an unloving mother and a domineering step-father. In 1928, she and her parents immigrated to America and settled in Madison, Wisconsin. With the advent of the Depression however, their poverty continued. Lea worked as a maid and a waitress while attempting to pursue a career as a singer.
In 1934 she married a Hawaiian musician, lived in Chicago, and had one son before returning to Madison and seeking a divorce. In 1935, she married Ernst Heine and as the economy improved her life became more settled. She had two more sons, then suddenly Ernst died of a heart attack in 1945. A third marriage in 1951 ended in divorce in 1955.
After Ernst's death, Lea returned to work, first at a ceramics studio, then for the Union Labor News, in 1955 for a research laboratory, and in 1963 for Central Wisconsin Colony. At the beginning of this period, she was actively involved in the union movement and in a campaign for adequate day care centers in Madison.
In 1966, Lea volunteered to become a VISTA volunteer. After training in a migrant labor camp in Florida, she was assigned to a community action program in South Carolina. Urged to develop her own project in the area, she decided to establish a remedial reading program at one of the all-Black elementary schools in Lancaster, South Carolina. While there, she also helped to establish a community center and aided generally with problems encountered by local residents. At one point she testified at hearings in Washington on segregation of the schools in Lancaster. In the spring of 1967, her VISTA term expired but she returned on her own in the summer of 1968 and again taught reading.
The impact of conditions among Blacks in Lancaster led her to publish a booklet entitled Me, which combined commentary with drawings by one of her students, Hattie Mae Clark. The success of the booklet led to an interview on national television's Today show and to the decision by VISTA to re-publish Me as a recruiting tool. Since 1968, Mrs. Heine has visited Lancaster several times.
