Actor Ossie Davis dies at 87; found dead in Miami hotel roomBy Hillel Italie
NEW YORK (AP) — Ossie Davis, the imposing, unshakable actor who championed racial justice on stage, on screen and in real life, often in tandem with his wife, Ruby Dee, has died. He was 87.
Davis was found dead Friday in his hotel room in Miami Beach, Fla., according to officials there. He was making a film called Retirement, said Arminda Thomas, who works in his office in suburban New Rochelle and confirmed the death.
Miami Beach police spokesman Bobby Hernandez said Davis’s grandson called shortly before 7 a.m. when Davis would not open the door to his room at the Shore Club Hotel. Davis was found dead and there does not appear to be any foul play, Hernandez said.
Davis, who wrote, acted, directed and produced for the theatre and Hollywood, was a central figure among black performers for decades. He and Dee celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1998 with the publication of a dual autobiography, In This Life Together.
Their partnership called to mind other performing couples, such as the Lunts, or Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy. Davis and Dee first appeared together in the plays Jeb, in 1946, and Anna Lucasta, in 1946-47. Davis’s first film, No Way Out in 1950, was Dee’s fifth.
Both had key roles in the television series Roots: The Next Generation (1978), Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum (1986) and The Stand (1994). Davis appeared in three Spike Lee films, including School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever. Dee also appeared in the latter two; among her best-known films was A Raisin in the Sun, in 1961.
In 2004, Davis and Dee were among the artists selected to receive the Kennedy Center Honors.
When not on stage or on camera, Davis and Dee were deeply involved in civil rights issues and efforts to promote the cause of blacks in the entertainment industry. They nearly ran afoul of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the early 1950s, but were never openly accused of any wrongdoing.
Davis directed several films, most notably Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and Countdown at Kusini (1976), in which he also appeared with Dee. Both wrote plays and screenplays, and
Other films in which Davis appeared include The Cardinal (1963), The Hill (1965), Grumpy Old Men (1993), The Client (1994) and I’m Not Rappaport (1996), a reprise of his stage role 10 years earlier.
On television, he appeared in The Emperor Jones (1955), Freedom Road (1979), Miss Evers’ Boys (1997) and Twelve Angry Men (1997). He was a cast member on The Defenders from 1963 to ’65, and Evening Shade from 1990 to ’94, among other shows.
Davis had just started his new movie on Monday, said Michael Livingston, his Hollywood agent.
“I’m shocked,” Livingston said. “I’m absolutely shocked. He was the most wonderful man I’ve ever known. Such a classy, kindly man.” His wife had gone to New Zealand to make a movie there, Livingston said.
The oldest of five children, Davis was born in tiny Cogdell, Ga., in 1917 and grew up in nearby Waycross and Valdosta. He left home in 1935, hitchhiking to Washington to enter Howard University, where he studied drama, intending to be a playwright.
His career as an actor began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem, then the centre of black culture in America. There, the young Davis met or mingled with some of the most influential figures of the time, including the preacher Father Divine, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.
He also had what he described in the book as a “flirtation with the Young Communist League,” which he said essentially ended with the onset of the Second World War. Davis spent nearly four years in service, mainly as a surgical technician in an army hospital in Liberia, serving both wounded troops and local inhabitants.
Back in New York in 1946, Davis debuted on Broadway in Jeb, a play about a returning soldier. His co-star was Dee, whose budding stage career had paralleled his own. They had even appeared in different productions of the same play, On Strivers Row, in 1940.
In December 1948, on a day off from rehearsals from another play, Davis and Dee took a bus to New Jersey to get married. They already were so close that “it felt almost like an appointment we finally got around to keeping,” Dee wrote in In This Life Together.
As black performers, they found themselves caught up in the social unrest fomented by the then-new Cold War and the growing debate over social and racial justice.
“We young ones in the theatre, trying to fathom even as we followed, were pulled this way and that by the swirling currents of these new dimensions of the Struggle,” Davis wrote in the joint autobiography.
He lined up with socialist reformer DuBois and singer Paul Robeson, remaining fiercely loyal to the singer even after Robeson was denounced by other black political, sports and show business figures for his openly communist and pro-Soviet sympathies.
While Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, the New York theatre world became engulfed in McCarthyism controversies, Davis and Dee emerged from the anti-communist fervour unscathed.
“We’ve never been, to our knowledge, guilty of anything — other than being black — that might upset anybody,” he wrote.
They were friends with baseball star Jackie Robinson — Dee played his wife, opposite Robinson himself, in the 1950 movie The Jackie Robinson Story — and with Malcolm X.
In the book, Davis told how a prior commitment caused them to miss the Harlem rally where Malcolm was assassinated in 1965. Davis delivered the eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral, calling him “our own black shining prince — who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.” He reprised it in a voice-over for the 1992 Spike Lee film, Malcolm X.
Along with film, stage and television, the couple’s careers extended to a radio show, The Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, that ran on 65 stations for four years in the mid-1970s, featuring a mix of black themes.
Both made numerous guest appearances on television shows.
― Huk-L, Friday, 4 February 2005 18:35 (twenty years ago)
Davis delivered the eulogy at Malcolm’s funeral, calling him “our own black shining prince — who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”The whole eulogy is quite remarkable. Let me see if I can find it...
Here—at this final hour, in this quiet place—Harlem has come to bid farewell to one of its brightest hopes—extinguished now, and gone from us forever. For Harlem is where he worked and where he struggled and fought—his home of homes, where his heart was, and where his people are—and it is, therefore, most fitting that we meet once again—in Harlem—to share these last moments with him.
For Harlem has ever been gracious to those who have loved her, have fought for her and have defended her honor even to the death. It is not in the memory of man that this beleaguered, unfortunate, but nonetheless proud community has found a braver, more gallant young champion than this Afro-American who lies before us—unconquered still.
I say the word again, as he would want me to: Afro-American—Afro-American Malcolm, who was a master, was most meticulous in his use of words. Nobody knew better than he the power words have over minds of men.
Malcolm had stopped being a "Negro" years ago. It had become too small, too puny, too weak a word for him. Malcolm was bigger than that. Malcolm had become an Afro-American, and he wanted—so desperately—that we, that all his people, would become Afro-Americans, too.
There are those who will consider it their duty, as friends of the Negro people, to tell us to revile him, to flee, even from the presence of his memory, to save ourselves by writing him out of the history of our turbulent times.
Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial and bold young captain—and we will smile. Many will say turn away—away from this man; for he is not a man but a demon, a monster, a subverter and an enemy of the black man—and we will smile. They will say that he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist—who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle! And we will answer and say to them:
Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did, you would know him. And if you knew him, you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood!
This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves. Last year, from Africa, he wrote these words to a friend: "My journey," he says, "is almost ended, and I have a much broader scope than when I started out, which I believe will add new life and dimension to our struggle for freedom and honor and dignity in the States.
"I am writing these things so that you will know for a fact the tremendous sympathy and support we have among the African States for our human rights struggle. The main thing is that we keep a united front wherein our most valuable time and energy will not be wasted fighting each other."
However we may have differed with him—or with each other about him and his value as a man—let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now.
Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man—but a seed—which, after the winter of our discontent, will come forth again to meet us.
And we will know him then for what he was and is—a prince—our own black shining prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.
― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 4 February 2005 18:42 (twenty years ago)