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 [Note:
MKN mourns the passing of Ossie Davis, but we celebrate his life with
tremendous pride and respect]
When
the entertainment industry talks about immensely talented couples who have
graced stage, screen and television, they always mention 1930’s theater
icons like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, or stage and cinema titans like
Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. Even the fabled volcanic relationship of
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and the collective family genius of
the Barrymores – John, Ethel and Lionel – are touted as greatness beyond
all measure. Not to take anything away from these entertainment legends I
- as Rod Serling used to say - submit this for your approval.
Ruby
Dee and Ossie Davis together are one complete Pulitzer poem.
A
master’s work formed by independent, free form verses of Love, Beauty and
Spirit. They rhyme, even in the small, shaded places of comfort. Have you
ever seen them mesmerize an interviewer? One speaks, the other listens
attentively, and then adds a point that takes the joint answer to a whole
other level. I could listen to their voices forever. Ruby speaks with
such high-wired energy that is paced like a well-played fast break. While
brother Ossie invariably measures his responses in volume and magnitude.
One gets the feeling that you could lay the audio track of one over the
other, and there would never be an instance when they are speaking out of
sync, at the same time.
I
don’t remember when I first saw them together on the stage or on a screen,
but somehow I feel that they have never really been apart. Even when they
are in separate places, they are together (if that makes any sense at
all).
I often wonder if our
younger generations really appreciate the magnificence they see before
them. Ossie and Ruby are the closest we’ve come to African American
royalty, and yet they touch us, walk among us like normal folk, which
elevates us all.
OSSIE DAVIS AND RUBY
DEE NAMED TO RECEIVE
2000 SCREEN ACTORS GUILD LIFE ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Los Angeles, November 14, 2000 – Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee have been
selected as the 37th recipients of Screen Actors Guild's highest honor
-- the Life Achievement Award for career achievement and humanitarian
accomplishment. The presentation of the 2000 Life Achievement Award will
take place during the live telecast of the 7th Annual Screen Actors Guild
Awards® from the Los Angeles Shrine Exposition Center on Sunday evening,
March 11, 2001, on Turner Network Television (TNT).
 In
making today’s announcement, SAG President William Daniels said, "For more
than half a century, together and individually, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee
have enriched and transformed American life as brilliant actors, writers,
directors, producers and passionate advocates for social justice, human
dignity and creative excellence. Screen Actors Guild is proud to honor
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s acclaimed body of work, their philanthropic
encouragement of performing artists, and their courage to live their
convictions. We are equally honored by their acceptance of this award."
Since meeting on Broadway in Jeb in 1946 and marrying in
1948, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee have excelled as collaborators and
individual artists, serving as compelling role models for artistic breadth
and social activism. They made their film debuts in 1950’s No Way Out
with Sidney Poitier, then starred together on Broadway in A Raisin in
the Sun. They brought Davis’ 1961 satirical comedy Purlie
Victorious to Broadway, then to film as Gone Are The Days.
For PBS they created the 1980-82 series With Ossie & Ruby and
produced A Walk Through the Twentieth Century With Bill Moyers
and Martin Luther King: The Dream & The Drum. Close friends of Dr.
King, they had served as masters of ceremonies for the historic 1963 March
on Washington. In 1976 they produced the first American feature to
be shot entirely in Africa by black professionals, Countdown at Kusini,
with Davis directing. Alex Haley’s Roots: The Next Generation, in
which both starred, garnered Ms. Dee her second of seven Emmy nominations
-- her first Emmy Award coming in 1991 for the Hallmark Hall of Fame
presentation Decoration Day. Both received NAACP Image Awards for
the 1996 CBS series Promised Land. Frequent collaborators with
provocative filmmaker Spike Lee, they starred in Do The Right Thing
and Jungle Fever. Mr. Davis recently appeared for Lee in Get On
the Bus, set against the Million Man March, and played himself
in Lee’s 1992 biography of Malcolm X, having delivered the
eloquent eulogy for the slain black leader in 1965.
 Ossie
Davis first electrified television audiences in 1965 in the title role in
The Emperor Jones. While Mr. Davis was directing his first feature,
the 1970 comedy Cotton Comes To Harlem (for which he also wrote the
screenplay and songs), Ruby Dee was starring for director Sidney
Poitier in the comedy Buck and the Preacher. Both films captured
new audiences for the industry. Emmy nominations greeted his
performances in Miss Evers’ Boys, King and Teacher,
Teacher. He starred on Broadway and on screen in I’m Not Rappaport,
with Walter Matthau and with Matthau and Jack Lemmon in Grumpy Old
Men. He received an Image nomination for The Client and this
year played the title role in Showtime’s Finding Buck McHenry,
starring opposite Ruby Dee. Mr. Davis received the Neil Simon Award for
his teleplay for For Us The Living: The Story of Medgar Evers. and
is the author of three children’s books: Langston, Just Like
Martin and the award-winning Escape to Freedom.
 Ruby
Dee,who drew national attention in 1950 in The Jackie Robinson Story,
broke ground herself in 1965 as the first black woman to play lead
roles at the American Shakespeare Festival -- Kate in Taming of the
Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear. She won an Obie Award
for the title role in Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, opposite
James Earl Jones and Image nominations for Having Our Say: The Delany
Sisters First Hundred Years and Captive Heart: The James Mink
Story. Her 1998 solo show, One Good Nerve, based on the
best-selling compilation of her short stories, folktales and poetry,
continued Ruby Dee’s notable work bringing her own words to life, begun
with Zora Is My Name, the Jules Dassin film Uptight, the
musical Take It From the Top, and the storytelling musical revue
Two Hah Has And A Homeboy, a collaboration with husband Ossie and
their son, musician Guy Davis.
Family is central to Davis and Dee, who also have two daughters Nora and
Hansa, both educators. They celebrated their 50th wedding
anniversary in 1998 with a benefit which raised $ 300,000 for New York
community theaters and with the publication of With Ossie and Ruby: In
This Life Together, an inspiring memoir set against the fabric of
historical events of the past half-century.
In their 52 years together, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee have been on the
frontlines of the fight for social justice. Early on they risked their
careers resisting McCarthyism. Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee’s activism has
seen them face arrest for protesting the killing in New York of a Guinean
immigrant, sue in Federal court for black voting rights, and speak for
citizen involvement in democracy and in support of sickle cell disease
research.
 Ossie
Davis and Ruby Dee were celebrated as "national treasures" when receiving
the National Medal of Arts from President and Mrs. Clinton at the White
House in 1995. They received the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
Silver Circle Award in 1994 and are inductees in the Theater Hall of Fame
and NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame. This year they returned to the
Lincoln Memorial to narrate Stephen Spielberg’s millennium celebration
film The Unfinished Journey.
The Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award was established in 1962.
For 37 years, the annual presentation of this award has celebrated the
achievements of a highly accomplished Guild member in improving the image
of the acting profession, and in public service and humanitarian
endeavors. Recent recipients were Sidney Poitier in 1999, Kirk Douglas in
1998 and Elizabeth Taylor in 1997.
[Photos and text
excerpted from Screen Actors Guild press release, November 14, 2000]
The
Real Bottom Line,
with guest Ruby Dee
Taped December 1st 1998 in Trinity Church Wall Street,
New York City
RUBY
DEE
We don't live in isolation, we really do come from each other, you
understand? And a collective spirit moves through us. Same things happen
in the heavens all the time, you understand? All of us here in this room,
we have a focus. across countries, across races, across culture, I think
we must find that language we have in common. Because we really need to
communicate with each other. We're gonna start talking soul to soul across
this globe.
(SHOW MUSIC)
(APPLAUSE)
JIM HARTZ
Welcome back. Joining me now from the nave of Trinity Church at Wall
Street is Ruby Dee. Such a treat to have you. First question I want to ask
you is where does all of your energy and creativity come from?
RUBY
DEE
I think that there is ... there is a spiritual component to us all. And
that is like the motor to what's the most important thing about us. It
keeps us focused on love, on yearning, on aspiration. And it keeps us
alive. And when we die, the life goes on. It's that same lifeline. We're
connected to each other by the life rope. (Laughs) And that's what I
think.
JIM HARTZ
You said you thought maybe you and Ossie had known each other before? Tell
me about that.
RUBY
DEE
Well, I think, in a sense, it's ... it's occurring to me very strongly
that we are each other in ... in profound ways. We are each other in this
world. Or else you ... you couldn't listen to me. Because we understand
each other more than from the language. We understand each other because
... because we have a spiritual basis in common.
JIM HARTZ
You guys are practicing Baptists, right?
RUBY
DEE
I've been a Baptist, a Methodist, a Unitarian, you know. But I feel also
that I'm a Buddhist, a monk, a Jew, an Arab, I really do feel like I'm all
these people. (Laughs)
(APPLAUSE)
JIM HARTZ
Is that all at once or have these been phases in your life?
RUBY
DEE
Oh, no. I've grown to this. We become who we are, you know. It's
preprogrammed with the package, I believe. So I've come to this
universality because that's the way I was, always. God didn't make, for
example, one kind of potato. Because he made lots of kinds of potatoes. In
case there's the plague on this one potato, then the potatoes would be
wiped out. The same thing, you don't have the Word of God. God never wrote
just one Word. I don't think he did just one book. God never did one of
anything, you know? He’s done hundreds of thousands ... many, many kinds
of species, people, flowers, trees. Every kind of thing. So therefore,
having realized this, because that's who I am, I said, "Oh, this is
another expression of divine spirit."
JIM HARTZ
We're talking about finding out who we are. Who are we? What’s our place
here, do you think?
RUBY
DEE
I think that that's one of the challenges of our existence on this earth.
And I think our chief assignment, I think we exist to explore love. Love,
I think, is one of the most difficult equations that humanity is faced
with. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Well, whoever wrote that don't know
some of these neighbors God put down here, huh?
(LAUGHTER)
RUBY
DEE
I have this spiritual argument with myself. But I think we're put down
here to explore, to understand, and to practice love.
JIM HARTZ
I was looking in here for a quote that Ossie wrote in your book, it said,
"We were living one of the great love stories, I think, of the 20th
century and we didn't know it, nobody told us." Where did that come from?
How does that fit in with what we were talking about?
RUBY
DEE
That's from the biography, "With Ossie and Ruby." We're living the
greatest love story? He did say that?
JIM HARTZ
Yeah, he did.
RUBY
DEE
Oh, my goodness.
(LAUGHTER)
RUBY
DEE
Well, we have come through something. Fifty years being married, there’s
been a lot of overcoming. There’s been a lot of struggle there. But then
that’s what we’re all about. We are moving from one position to another in
this life. And in the process of trying to unravel this thing called love
that has kept us together, and thinking we almost know what that is after
50 years … we almost know what love is.
JIM HARTZ
How much longer is it going to take?
(LAUGHTER)
RUBY
DEE
But you’ve got to give it time. And maybe with more people exploring just
what is love. You think when you get married that the wedding is just an
incident. But marriage is everyday. You think you love somebody, but love
is an aspiration, Jim. We invented God because of love. Or vice versa. Not
invented God, but you know, that’s all part of the thing.
JIM HARTZ
How did you come to grips with juggling all these things and keeping an
even keel at the same time?
RUBY
DEE
That took practice and a lot of tears and screaming. This was all before
women’s lib. What’s important about humanity is also women. It cannot take
your life and my life to make your life, you understand? We had to learn
that. I should say maybe I understood it being a woman. And so in my
anguish about feeling that something was wrong, because Ossie is a very
sensitive person, I had good material to work with.
(LAUGHTER)
RUBY
DEE
So we taught each other, I scratching through to what I'm all about, and
he trying to find out what was this thing, union and marriage and children
and that, and what is it working together, having to prove that I'm just
more than a wife and I've got a brain. We must cooperate in this ting.
Learning to cooperate, learning to overcome the prejudices that we had,
man and woman. And so therefore when I say Ossie was good material and
thank God … a husband just doesn’t become a good husband. Somebody has to
lead him to that.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
RUBY
DEE
And so with God’s help, we made this really nice husband.
JIM HARTZ
You're troubled a little bit about the future. You think that we’re in
store for some tough times, even though on the surface everything looks
pretty good right now. We’re at peace. The economy is rolling along
nicely. But you're worried about something else in the future, you say, in
a way it could be worse than sexism, could be worse than racism. What are
your concerns now?
RUBY
DEE
I think that we are on the verge of another kind of revolution. We've had
the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, Technological
Revolution, Information Revolution. And now we’re on the verge, I think,
of a spiritual revolution. That must happen because the economic
revolution is about to do us in. We don’t sense it now but it’s coming.
You cannot keep globally putting people out of work when this has been the
basis of how we live. A person is judged by the kind of work they do. The
rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. That equation
can't last very long. We’re going to need to inform the greedy and we’re
going to need to inform ourselves that there has to be a new economic
equation. And it’s going to have to be informed by a spiritual revolution,
a recognition of the spiritual nature of life. We are at base divine
spiritual people. And I feel that unless we come to that conclusion, we
are going to be in serious trouble.
JIM HARTZ
How much of your early life fuels your thinking on this? I really loved
your book because I thought you and Ossie Davis both gave some wonderful
insights on growing up in the Depression, growing up in Harlem and growing
up in Georgia. What effect did growing up like that have on you today? Do
you look back and resent it, hate it? Do you carry around a grudge of that
period?
RUBY
DEE
No, I can’t carry it around because I don’t begrudge the past. It has been
a troubling thing, racism and sexism. It erodes confidence in yourself,
especially if you don’t how not to buy into it.
JIM HARTZ
What do you mean?
RUBY
DEE
Well, if you call me a name and I believe that what you call me, I spend
my life becoming that which you label me, you understand? And until we
understand the nature of love, because love does not permit us to do these
things to one another, that we hack away at each other’s essence … so I
came with this. I can't take any credit, but I can't hold the anger. I
can't look at the racist, for example, and say, "Oh, I hate you." Ossie
said this to me a long time ago. He said, "As long as you look at the
hole, the hole begins to look into you." And I think that’s true. And I
couldn’t give my space as a human being over to the haters. I had to lift
my head up and find the way out, like that rat in a maze. Which is the way
out and around this? So I've spent a great deal of my life getting
involved in things where I could do something, where I could use whatever
gifts I had. And Ossie had studied philosophy, and he’s saying over and
over, "What is without remedy must be without regard." So after I had
decided that I was a colored girl living in America, I had to come up from
behind that. I could not let racism dictate the joy of life. I had
something to do in spite of it. So I had to let it go. Not to say I didn’t
struggle, because we’d spent our whole lives serving people who were bound
for justice for all people in the country, who were struggling and being
hung and eyes gouged out. So we participated in the struggle for justice.
And in that, I felt that there was a positive. I had to give the racism,
the discrimination, the exclusion, I had to give it a positive edge by
struggling for justice, struggling for opportunity.
JIM HARTZ
The struggle makes you stronger.
RUBY
DEE
Yes, struggle makes you stronger. This is what I'm thinking about today.
I'm hoping that we’re not forgetting how to struggle because the struggle
times coming are like none other in this world. So I'm thinking that’s
what saved me from resentment. Resentment can make you bitter. I don’t
want to give the advertising space of myself to the enemies.
JIM HARTZ
We’re going to have to take a break. When we return, we’ll have some
questions from our audience here at Trinity Church Wall Street for Ruby
Dee. Don’t go away.
(APPLAUSE)
(SHOW MUSIC)
RUBY
DEE
And I’ll just say this one little poem. I think about today. We can talk
about the millennium all we want, but today is all we have. And today is
ours. So let’s live it. And love is strong, let’s give it. A song can
help, let’s sing it. And peace is dear, let’s bring it. The past is gone,
don’t rue it. Our work is here, let’s do it. Our world is wrong, let’s
right it. The battle hard, let’s fight it. The road is rough, let’s clear
it. The future vast, don’t fear it. Is faith asleep? Let’s wake it. Today
is ours, let’s take it.
JIM HARTZ
This is "The Real Bottom Line" and we have some questions now for Ruby Dee
from our audience gathered here at Trinity Church Wall Street.
WOMAN
I think the most magnificent thing that both of you do is combine our art
and politics together. And I wondered how we can get more people to do
that.
RUBY
DEE
I think there’s no separation, really. The world is the textbook for the
artist. And everybody and everything in it is what feeds us. But Joey
McCarthy, we have to watch out for that. Because McCarthy almost made that
impossible, those days of the witch hunt when we dare not think this and
think that. And we haven’t really quite recovered from that. We’re still
only using the arts … they went back to kindergarten. It was back in the
sixth grade before McCarthy. And it was moving up. Its concerns were real
and genuine and practical. But then along came McCarthy and we’re back now
to a kind of general triviality. Not entirely, but I think the arts are
going to move up from that. And we’re going to mature because the arts
describe and determine the quality of our lives so much. So much that art
does for us.
MAN
What is your message to the youth, our future leaders of tomorrow today,
as they prepare for the Information Age for the new millennium?
RUBY
DEE
You know, I have this feeling about the Information Age. It’s so technical
and it’s so marvelously intricate and I love it. We can be intimidated by
that. But we must never forget that we are the most complicated, intricate
instrument ever devised in imagination or in reality. We human beings are.
And we must not be intimidated by that. And my feeling is that we have to
exercise greater control over ourselves. We cannot give ourselves over to
the robots. We must know that the spirit is in charge, and everything else
is subservient to that. And although we may create miracle ships to take
us to outer space, there will come a time, I think, when we can simply
close our eyes and put ourselves somewhere. We as human beings are capable
of that. I think we have to really concentrate on our enormous
capabilities as these magnificent creatures that we are. We have
possibilities that we have scarcely begun to explore.
MAN
Jim Hartz asked you about the past, and I'd like to take it from another
point of view and ask you, if you would, to gaze into any crystal ball you
may have and tell us what you're thinking about in terms of your next 50
years. Will you be doing anything more of anything or less of some things?
What changes do you see for Ruby Dee in the next 50 years?
RUBY
DEE
Oh, my dear, thank you for that marvelous question. I have this notion,
you know, we’re living to be 65 and older for some reason. We’re getting
to be an older population, and I think we’re going to have to try to find
those reasons why. And I happen to think that we older people are living
because we’re going to be the next line of revolution. (Laughs) I think
we’re going to get to our crutches and our wheelchairs and our medication
and stuff and we’re going to hit the streets, hit the pavement, get to
these government houses, see why we can't improve education and our
schools instead of putting our jails on the stock market. And what about
the family? Are we talking out of both sides of our mouth? We have to do
something about this business of motherhood and sexism. Does that answer
the question? That’s what I'm looking forward to. I’m looking forward to
belonging to that group that’s already in existence, by the way. We’re
looking for a solid agenda because what have we got to lose? Who’s gonna
kill us?
(APPLAUSE)
JIM HARTZ
I want to thank you for joining us and hope that you will join us again
next week for "The Real Bottom Line" and our special thanks today to our
special guest Ruby Dee. Thank you.
RUBY
DEE
Thank you, Jim, for having me.
(APPLAUSE)
(SHOW MUSIC)
(END OF PROGRAM)
Eulogy Delivered
By Ossie Davis
At The Funeral Of Malcolm X
Faith
Temple Church Of God, February 27,1965
 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 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 the 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. 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.
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