Regarded by Martin Luther King as ‘‘close personal friends,’’ Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were among the celebrities involved in efforts to publicize and fund the work of King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Born December 18, 1917 in Cogdell, Georgia, Davis left the South in 1935 and hitchhiked to Washington, D.C. At Howard University, Davis majored in English and studied drama with the intent of becoming a playwright. After he dropped out of college in 1939, he moved to Harlem to begin his career on the stage.
Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, Dee was raised in Harlem. She joined the American Negro Theater while attending Hunter College (BA, 1945). Dee made her Broadway debut in a 1943 play named ‘‘South Pacific’’ (different from the better-known musical of the same name). In 1946, she met up-and-coming actor Ossie Davis when he starred in the play, ‘‘Jeb,’’ a show about a returning World War II veteran who faced down the Ku Klux Klan; Dee was an understudy in the play.
Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis married in 1948, and as a couple they often staged benefits for civil rights groups and labor unions. In 1957, Davis authored a dramatic rendering of the Montgomery bus boycott, called ‘‘Montgomery Footprints.’’ His 1961 Broadway hit ‘‘Purlie Victorious’’ in which he starred with Dee dealt with racial issues. Dee starred in the Broadway hit, ‘‘A Raisin in the Sun,’’ which won the 1959 Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play.
The couple first encountered Dr. King in 1956 at Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Davis noted King’s ‘‘mellifluous, rolling baritone’’ and his commanding speaking style, ‘‘building one tower of rhetoric after another.’’
In 1963, the couple served as masters of ceremonies for the 1963 March on Washington, scene of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Ossie Davis delivered the eulogy for Malcolm X after the black leader’s 1965 assassination.
Over the years, singly and together, they received numerous honors as performers and activists. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were voted into the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame together in 1989, awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1995, received the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for their career and humanitarian achievements in 2001, and in 2004 they received one of this country’s most prestigious artistic accolades – the Kennedy Center Honors.
In November 2005 Ruby Dee was awarded – along with her late husband – the Lifetime Achievement Freedom Award, presented by the National Civil Rights Museum located in Memphis, TN.
