Another creative and artistic giant has bid America adieux. Ruby Dee, the award-winning actress whose seven-decade career included triumphs on stage and screen, has died. She was 91.
Dee died peacefully Wednesday at her New Rochelle, N.Y., home according to her representative, Michael Livingston.
Dee—often with her late husband, Ossie Davis—was a formidable force in both the performing arts community and the civil rights movement. The couple were master and mistress of ceremonies at the 1963 March on Washington, and she was friends with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Dee also received the Frederick Douglass Award in 1970 from the New York Urban League.
As an actress, her film credits included “The Jackie Robinson Story” (1950), “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961), “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), “Do the Right Thing” (1989) and “American Gangster” (2007).
Dee earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in “Gangster.” She also won an Emmy and Grammy for other work and was given (along with Davis, the National Medal of Arts and a Kennedy Center Honors award.
Born Ruby Ann Wallace in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1922, Dee moved to New York’s Harlem as a child with her father Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace and stepmother Emma Amelia Benson. She took the surname Dee after marrying blues singer Frankie Dee two decades later. She divorced Dee after a short marriage and was wedded to Davis in 1948. Davis preceded his wife in death in 2005.
During the 1960s, Dee appeared in such politically charged films as “Gone Are the Days” and “The Incident,” which is recognized as helping pave the way for young African American actors and filmmakers.
Dee became known to a younger generation with roles in two Spike Lee films. She co-starred with Davis in Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and in his 1991 film “Jungle Fever.”
Her television work included 20 episodes of “Peyton Place” in 1969 and the role of Queen Haley in the 1979 miniseries “Roots: The Next Generation.”
Dee and Davis—who were married 56 years, always seemed connected—were an odd couple in some ways: She from New York, he from Waycross, Ga. She was small and stylish, he was big and bluff. But their beliefs were often as one, and they practiced what they preached.
“We shared a great deal in common; we didn’t have any distractions as to where we stood in society. We were Black activists. We had a common understanding,” she told Ebony in 1988.
Her activism work included membership in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Dee is survived by three children, Guy Davis, Hasna Muhammad Davis and Nora Day Davis.
