Long before her death this week, at the age of ninety-one, Ruby Dee had come to be something of a load-bearing column in American culture—recognizably essential to that portion of it most closely identified with African-Americans, but also upholding something bigger. And there is the sense that her absence, coming in such close conjunction with the death of her peer Maya Angelou, leaves something less wieldy and in need of shoring up. Between 1946 and 2013, Dee appeared in more than a hundred films, plays, and television shows, but her legacy can be only partially understood through her credits. Dee, along with Ossie Davis, her husband of fifty-seven years, was an actor—in both meanings of the word—during the civil-rights movement. She was in the generation of artists, few of whom remain among us, whose work served as a brief for the ideal of racial equality, and who formed part of the cultural front of the era.
Dee was born in Ohio but grew up on 137th Street and Seventh Avenue in Harlem, three blocks from where the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture now stands. She and her husband (until his death, in 2005) were mainstays of the Center; I happened to be there on Thursday afternoon, and, as word of her death made its way through the building, clusters of staff and visitors began sharing memories of their encounters with the couple. It was a fitting venue for such remembrances in more ways than one. Before the Schomburg Center was built, the space housed the American Negro Theatre, a repertory company best known for launching the careers of Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. In 1940, a teen-age Ruby Wallace (she took the surname Dee after her first marriage) wandered into the building with the recalcitrant notion that she would pursue a career in the theatre. The arts are seldom hailed for their career practicality, but in prewar New York, when blacks were locked out of even many blue-collar professions, it required a particular brand of audacity to embark on something as ephemeral as acting. She’d broached her interest in drama with one of her teachers at Hunter College High School, she remembered, only to be told that she couldn’t be cast because that year’s production didn’t feature any maids. (The same year, Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her role as a house servant in “Gone with the Wind.”) Much later, in a memoir she co-wrote with Davis, she recalled her first audition at the American Negro Theatre:
She managed to land the part despite herself. Six years later, she was cast in a play called “Jeb,” opposite a gangly newcomer whom she thought had “picked out his clothing from a Salvation Army bin with his eyes closed.” She went on to marry her castmate in 1948, and she and Davis began a nearly six-decade-long personal and artistic collaboration that earned a degree of public reverence quite distinct from the usual fatuous fondness for celebrity coupledom. By the time many people of my generation first became aware of them, in Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” they were spoken of in tandem: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the eight syllables running together in the way we usually reserve for law partnerships or musical duos. The marvel at their marriage was based in part on their mutual admiration, which had not been effaced by the passing of decades, but, particularly among African-Americans, their union was also seen as a kind of emblem of possibility against great odds. (Many people now see the Obamas’ marriage in a similar way.) At the time of Davis’s death, they had shared more than thirty joint credits in theatre, television, and film, and had co-hosted a radio program for four years in the seventies. They were also co-emcees at the 1963 March on Washington. Their work as activists brought them into contact with a widening circle of artists and radicals that included Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Malcolm X, who defied a Nation of Islam prohibition against theatre to attend one of their plays. Years later, in the wake of his assassination, the couple stayed up all night revising versions of Malcolm X’s eulogy, which Davis delivered at the Faith Temple Church in Harlem.
In 1960, Dee starred opposite Poitier in the original production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” which became a major theatrical hit, furthering her increasingly substantial artistic reputation. She worked steadily throughout the decade and was one of a small number of actors who made the transition from civil-rights-era fare into the more confrontational work of the Blaxploitation era, in the seventies. In the eighties, she wrote children’s books and published “My Last Good Nerve,” a collection of short essays and poems. And she kept appearing in dozens of plays and films. I had the occasion to see Ruby Dee perform, twelve years ago, in a small theatrical production in Atlanta. She was cast as an imperious nineteen-sixties-era community leader trying to organize a Presidential visit to a blighted Philadelphia neighborhood. She played the character with a cultivated reserve that was at once credible and completely superficial, recalling the contradictions in the lives of a generation raised to believe personal dignity was among the most potent weapons against segregation. I remember being convinced by the performance, but more impressed that she’d embodied a phenomenon that is seldom spoken about. Such humanizing of people who remain invisible in plain view was central to her work, evidence that audacity is sometimes its own best reward.
Above: Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and their children, in 1966. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum.
