Ossie Davis 1917–

Actor, writer, director, producer

At a Glance…

Arrived in New York City

Frustrated by Limited Roles for Blacks

Considered Himself Primarily a Writer

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Selected writings

Sources

With the build and vitality of an NFL lineman, Ossie Davis hardly looks like the grand old man of black theater. Known to younger audiences as Ponder Blue on television’s Evening Shade and as “the mayor” in filmmaker Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Davis made his Broadway debut in 1946. He directed the landmark film Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970 and wrote and starred in Purlie Victorious, the 1961 play that was eventually revived as the smash Broadway musical Purlie.

Davis was born on December 18, 1917, in tiny Cogdell, Georgia. The oldest of five children, he grew up in a family of poor but inspired preachers and storytellers, an environment that provided him good grounding for the stage. “Acting and preaching are essentially the same—unabashedly so,” Davis told Florida’s Palm Beach Post. “The theater is a church and I consider myself as part of an institution that has an obligation to teach about Americanism, our culture and morals.”

Though neither his father, Kince Charles Davis, a railway construction worker, or his mother, Laura, ever learned to read, they nevertheless, through the oral tradition, taught Davis the importance of education. “I was just caught up in the wonderful stories mom and dad would tell,” he told the Palm Beach Post. “They weren’t children’s stories, but humorous tales of their own escapades. They took life and broke it up in little pieces and fed it to us like little birds. I think I always knew what I wanted to do. I went to school to learn to write.”

Like many blacks growing up in the 1920s, Davis managed to find good role models despite a resource-poor environment. “My mentors were real and unreal,” he told American Visions. “My mentors were Brer Rabbit and High John the Conqueror, and even animals to whom I could talk when I was a boy. My mentors were friends who could tell jokes faster than me. Of course, I had organized mentors, too. Regular teachers in school and out. And there were mentors on the stage itself. People like [singers] Paul Robeson, Lena Home, and [trumpet player] Louis Armstrong.”

But while a lack of resources could not prevent him from wanting to learn, they almost prevented him from getting an education. Though Davis’s parents were full of pride when he won a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he had to turn it down because they had no money to pay for his living expenses. In 1935, though, things took a turn for the better; two aunts living in Washington, D.C., agreed to house him

At a Glance…

Born December 18, 1917, in Cogdell, GA; son of Kince Charles (a railway construction worker) and Laura Davis; married Ruby Ann Wallace (Ruby Dee; an actress), December 9, 1948; children: Nora, Guy, Lavern (Hasna). Education: Howard University, B.A., 1939.

Member of Rose McClendon Players, 1938–1941; stage actor, 1946—; made Broadway debut in Jeb, 1946; other stage appearances include Anna Lucasta, A Raisin in the Sun, Wisteria Trees, Purlie Victorious, and I’m Not Rappaport; film appearances include Gone Are the Days, 1963, Do The Right Thing, 1989, and Jungle Fever, 1991. Television appearances include roles in the teleplays The Emperor Jones and Teacher Teacher; guest spots in The Defenders, The Fugitive, and Bonanza; regular roles in series With Ossie and Ruby (and co-producer), and Evening Shade; photodocumentary Lincoln (voice of Frederick Douglass), ABC-TV, 1992; The American Experience (narrator), PBS, 1993; and roles in ministers Queen, CBS, 1993, and film The Ernest Green Story, Disney Channel, 1993. Radio appearances include the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, 1974–78. Director of films, including Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1970, Kongi’s Harvest, 1970, and Gordon’s War, 1973; producer of Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum and A Walk Through the 20th Century With Bill Moyers. Military service: U.S. Army, 1942–1945.

Awards: Emmy nomination for performance in Teacher Teacher, 1969; inducted into NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame, 1989.

Addresses: Agent—The Artists Agency, 10,000 Santa Monica Blvd., Ste. 305, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

while he attended Howard University. “My parents found enough money to buy me lunch one day and I hitchhiked to Washington to live with my aunts and attend Howard University,” he told the Palm Beach Post. “There I met a number of people who were very important to my career.”

Chief among Davis’s influences at Howard was Alain Locke. Called “the philosophical midwife to a generation of younger artists, writers and poets” by American Visions, Locke, a drama critic and professor of philosophy, encouraged Davis, who already wanted to write for the theater, to move to Harlem and join the Rose McClendon Players. Locke suggested that Davis, who had never seen live actors, would benefit from acting and learning what it takes to put on a play. Davis accepted the idea but only as a way to further his writing ambitions. “I never, never intended to become an actor,” he told Newsday.

Arrived in New York City

Davis arrived in Harlem in 1938 and worked odd jobs while studying acting. It was a difficult period; at times he was reduced to sleeping in parks and scrounging for food. In 1941 he made his stage debut in the McClendon Players presentation of Joy Exceeding Glory. When the U.S. entered World War II, Davis joined the Army. He began his service as a surgical technician in Liberia, West Africa. Later, he was transferred to the Special Services Department, where he wrote and produced stage works to entertain military personnel. Among these was Goldbrickers of 1944, which was first produced in Liberia.

After the war Davis returned to Georgia but was soon contacted by McClendon director Richard Campbell, who convinced him to come to New York and audition for Jeb, a play by Robert Ardrey. At age 28, Davis won the lead role and made his Broadway debut. He earned favorable reviews as a disabled veteran attempting to succeed as an adding-machine operator in racist Louisiana, but the play itself was panned and lasted only nine performances. Though it bombed at the box office, Jeb was far from a total loss; it put Davis on the theatrical map, and it was in the cast of Jeb that Davis met Ruby Ann Wallace, whose stage name was Ruby Dee. The two became close and took roles with the touring company of Anna Lucasta. They were married on December 9, 1948. “Ruby was my colleague,” Davis told Newsday , “and then she became my friend and eventually my wife.”

After his marriage, Davis continued to appear in plays and, as time progressed, he took roles in television and films. Presentations like Stevedore and No Time for Sergeants paid the bills while others, like No Way Out —the powerful film about racial violence with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee—Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Kraft Theater’s 1955 television presentation of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones provided roles into which Davis could sink his teeth. Later, he remembered what an all-encompassing political and social—as well as professional—life the theater was. “In our day, theater was a serious commitment,” he told the Milwaukee Journal. “That was the style of the times…. In New York City, you acted in the theater, and afterward, you went to a [civil rights movement] party for a lynching victim later that evening. [Actor Marlon] Brando was in one corner and [actor-director] Orson Welles was in the other corner. It was the same at home. I was born in the South, and my parents were always involved in something, raising money for this cause or that protest.”

Frustrated by Limited Roles for Blacks

Despite some good roles, Davis was not happy with his treatment or that of blacks in general. “I knew I was going to be rejected so I had very low expectations,” he revealed in Blacks in American Film and Television. “But rejection did sting. In the theater it took a peculiar form—of having to compete with your peers, like I did for The Green Pastures on Broadway, to fight to say words you were ashamed of. Ruby and I came along at a time when being black was not yet fashionable. There was little in the theater for us except to carry silver trays.”

But Broadway was not the only place in which Davis could exercise his considerable talents. “We have always been involved in black theater, in the way that we saw [it],” Davis told American Visions. “Ruby and I took our notebooks and created our own theater. We went out into the marketplace, then to churches, to the schools and did what we could theatrically. Our relationship with black theater has always been continuous. It is just that we had to sometimes define what it is we meant by black theater.” Davis and Dee’s commitment to the black community went beyond staging dramas; in 1963 they acted as official hosts for the legendary civil rights March on Washington. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s they stayed in constant contact with African American activists such as Malcolm X (at whose funeral Davis delivered the eulogy), Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Davis and Dee made every effort to build a normal family life for their three children, Hasna, Guy, and Nora. Living in a working-class neighborhood of Mount Vernon, New York, they preserved the family unit, which is so often distorted by the pressures of show business. “I think if there is anything to be said, our children were able at all levels and at all times to participate fully in the life we led,” Davis told American Visions. “We didn’t live a life away from them. There wasn’t a career outside of the house from which they were barred. We managed to function as a family—with a sense of ‘us-ness.’”

Considered Himself Primarily a Writer

Davis, who had never ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer, continued writing and shopping his plays and screenplays to producers throughout the 1950s and ’60s. His play Alice in Wonder appeared in New York in 1952. The drama, which recreated the Senator Joe McCarthy era of Cold-War communist-hunting, was revised and expanded the following year as The Big Deal but was dimly received. It was not until 1961 that Davis’s writing abilities brought him real success. Purlie Victorious premiered September 28, 1961, at New York City’s Cort Theatre. A comedy about an itinerant black preacher who attempts to claim his inheritance and establish an integrated church, Purlie Victorious enjoyed a long and interesting life; it ran more than seven months in New York City and was later revived first as a motion picture called Gone Are the Days and then as the Broadway musical Purlie. Despite its relatively long run in its first incarnation, Purlie Victorious made little money. Whites did not attend it and without white support, a black theater of that era could not succeed in New York.

Davis spent much of the 1960s earning his bread and butter in movies and in episodes of television shows like The Defenders, The Doctors, The Fugitive, and Bonanza. It was not the kind of work he relished. “I’m not a great actor,” he told Blacks in American Film and Television. “I’ve never devoted myself to my craft with the intensity Ruby has. I’ve always felt I’d rather be a writer. But we had to make a living.” Despite this self-criticism, Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker, wrote that Davis, “in such movies as The Hill and The Scalphunters, brought a stronger presence to his roles than white actors did, and a deeper joy. What a face for the camera. He was a natural king.”

As the 1960s progressed, Davis began receiving the kind of attention he deserved; in 1968 his play Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir was produced at the University of California at Santa Barbara and in 1969, he received an Emmy nomination for his performance in the teleplay Teacher Teacher. By 1970 he had become one of the busiest African Americans in the entertainment industry. He made his debut as a film director with Cotton Comes to Harlem, adapted Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest for the screen, and his play Purlie Victorious returned to Broadway as the musical smash Purlie.

Cotton Comes to Harlem

Cotton Comes to Harlem was a landmark of black cinema. One of the first black films to make money from a mainstream audience, it opened the way for a wave of pictures about blacks now known as “blaxploitation” films. Unlike that of later, darker movies like Shaft, Davis’s vision was more comic. Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television, attested of Cotton, “A joyousness ran through the film that lured audiences around the country into the theaters.” Clive Barnes of the New York Times called Purlie, which opened at the Broadway Theater on March 15, 1970, “by far the most successful and richest of all black musicals,” describing the production as “strong” and “so magnificent” and praising “the depth of the characterization and the salty wit of the dialogue.”

Through the mid-1970s Davis continued to direct. While his films—Black Girl, Gordon’s War, and Countdown at Kusini —were received unevenly, there was a significance to his work that critics could not ignore. Bogle commented that “in a strange way…Davis could be called one of the more serious black directors of his era; political undercurrents [ran] throughout much of his work. He…never settled for simply making a standard action movie…[He] hoped to take black American cinema into a new, more politically oriented direction [and] for that he has to be commended.”

Davis spent the remainder of the 1970s pursuing diverse interests. From 1974 until 1978 he and his wife co-hosted the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour on radio. In 1976 he appeared in the film Let’s Do It Again. Also that year, his play Escape to Freedom: A Play About Young Frederick Douglass was produced at New York City’s Town Hall. In 1981, he and Ruby began appearing in With Ossie and Ruby on PBS. Through their company, Emmalyn II Productions, they co-produced the show with two public television stations. The program, which presented a broad mix of material, ran for three years. “It was one of the highlights of our lives because it gave us the opportunity to do shows by authors we respect,” Dee told the Greensboro News and Record.

With their children, Davis and Dee worked in the context of Emmalyn II through much of the 1980s, producing a variety of programs including Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum and A Walk Through History for PBS. Far from withdrawing from acting, though, Davis continued working on the stage, in film, and on television. In 1986 he starred in a production of Tony Award-Winning American dramatist Herb Gardner’s I’m Not Rappaport at actor Burt Reynolds’s Jupiter Theater in Florida. Davis appeared in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze and in 1989, he played “the mayor” in Lee’s controversial and acclaimed Do the Right Thing. It was a role in which he presided not only over the street where the film’s action took place but over the coming of age of a new generation of black filmmakers.

Past 70 and in the public eye more than ever for his stunning performance as the Good Reverend Dr. Purify in Lee’s Jungle Fever, as well as for his regular spot as Burt Reynolds’s best friend on television’s Evening Shade, Davis reflected on his career, telling American Visions, “I was able to hang on to the gifts of my childhood longer than normal, to daydream, to think of things in the imagination, to play and be a play actor.” In 1992 Davis exercised his gifts as a novelist when he published a story for young adults called Just Like Martin. Centered on the activities of a small-town Alabama church congregation during the civil rights movement, Davis’s first foray into fiction is “an attempt to recapture some sense of the black church as a political and moral base in the fight against racism,” according to Publishers Weekly contributor Calvin Reid. Of his decision to move in this direction, Davis told Reid, “I can move between these different disciplines because I am essentially a storyteller, and the story I want to tell is about black people. Sometimes I sing the story, sometimes I dance it, sometimes I tell tall tales about it, but I always want to share my great satisfaction at being a black man at this time in history.”

Selected writings

Plays

(And director) Goldbrickers of 1944 (produced in Liberia), 1944.

Alice in Wonder (produced at Elks Community Theater, 1952; revised and produced as The Big Deal at New Playwrights Theater, New York City, 1953).

Purlie Victorious (produced at Cort Theatre, New York City), 1961.

Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir (produced at University of California at Santa Barbara), 1968.

(With Philip Rose, Peter Udell, and Gary Geld) Purlie (produced at Broadway Theater, New York City), 1970.

Escape to Freedom: A Play About Young Frederick Douglass (produced at Town Hall, New York City), 1976.

Langston: A Play, Delacorte, 1982.

Film and television

Gone Are the Days (film), Trans Lux, 1963.

(With Arnold Perl; and director) Cotton Comes to Harlem (film), United Artists, 1970.

(And director) Kongi’s Harvest (film; adapted from work by Wole Soyinka), Calpenny Films Nigeria Ltd., 1970.

Today Is Ours, CBS-TV, 1974.

Fiction

Just Like Martin, Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Contributor to periodicals, including Negro History Bulletin, Negro Digest, and Freedomways.

Sources

Books

Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Film and Television, Garland, 1988.

Funke, Lewis, The Curtain Rises—The Story of Ossie Davis, Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.

Periodicals

American Visions, April/May 1992.

Greensboro News and Record (North Carolina), August 17, 1989.

Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1989.

Milwaukee Journal, June 9, 1991.

Newsday, March 24, 1987.

New York Times, June 30, 1989.

Palm Beach Post (Florida), May 10, 1988.

Publishers Weekly, December 28, 1992.

—Jordan Wankoff

Ossie Davis

1917-2005

Actor, director, producer, writer

With the build and vitality of an NFL lineman, Ossie Davis hardly looked like the grand old man of black theater. Known to younger audiences as Ponder Blue on television's Evening Shade and as "the mayor" in filmmaker Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Davis made his Broadway debut in Jeb in 1946. He directed the landmark film Cotton Comes to Harlem in 1970 and wrote and starred in Purlie Victorious, the 1961 play that was eventually revived as the smash Broadway musical Purlie. Enthralled with his art, Davis worked until the day he died in 2005.

Grew Up Poor in the South

Raiford Chatman Davis was born on December 18, 1917, in tiny Cogdell, Georgia. His name was officially registered as "Ossie" when a clerk misheard Davis' mother pronounce her newborn son's initials "R. C." Laura Davis did not correct the clerk, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune. The oldest of five children, he grew up in a family of poor but inspired preachers and storytellers, an environment that provided him good grounding for the stage. "Acting and preaching are essentially the same—unabashedly so," Davis told Florida's Palm Beach Post. "The theater is a church and I consider myself as part of an institution that has an obligation to teach about Americanism, our culture and morals."

Though neither his father, Kince Charles Davis, a railway construction worker, nor his mother, Laura, ever learned to read, they nevertheless, through the oral tradition, taught Davis the importance of education. "I was just caught up in the wonderful stories mom and dad would tell," he told the Palm Beach Post. "They weren't children's stories, but humorous tales of their own escapades. They took life and broke it up in little pieces and fed it to us like little birds. I think I always knew what I wanted to do. I went to school to learn to write."

Like many blacks growing up in the 1920s, Davis managed to find good role models despite a resource-poor environment. "My mentors were real and unreal," he told American Visions. "My mentors were Brer Rabbit and High John the Conqueror, and even animals to whom I could talk when I was a boy. My mentors were friends who could tell jokes faster than me. Of course, I had organized mentors, too. Regular teachers in school and out. And there were mentors on the stage itself. People like [singers] Paul Robeson, Lena Horne, and [trumpet player] Louis Armstrong."

But while a lack of resources could not prevent him from wanting to learn, they almost prevented him from getting an education. Though Davis's parents were full of pride when he won a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he had to turn it down because they had no money to pay for his living expenses. In 1935, though, things took a turn for the better; two aunts living in Washington, D.C., agreed to house him while he attended Howard University. "My parents found enough money to buy me lunch one day and I hitchhiked to Washington to live with my aunts and attend Howard University," he told the Palm Beach Post. "There I met a number of people who were very important to my career."

Began Acting as Research

Chief among Davis's influences at Howard was Alain Locke. Called "the philosophical midwife to a generation of younger artists, writers and poets" by American Visions, Locke, a drama critic and professor of philosophy, encouraged Davis, who already wanted to write for the theater, to move to Harlem and join the Rose McClendon Players. Locke suggested that Davis, who had never seen live actors, would benefit from acting and learning what it takes to put on a play. Davis accepted the idea but only as a way to further his writing ambitions. "I never, never intended to become an actor," he told Newsday.

Davis arrived in Harlem in 1938 and worked odd jobs while studying acting. It was a difficult period; at times he was reduced to sleeping in parks and scrounging for food. In 1941 he made his stage debut in the McClendon Players presentation of Joy Exceeding Glory. When the United States entered World War II, Davis joined the Army. He began his service as a surgical technician in Liberia, West Africa. Later, he was transferred to the Special Services Department, where he wrote and produced stage works to entertain military personnel. Among these was Goldbrickers of 1944, which was first produced in Liberia.

After the war Davis returned to Georgia but was soon contacted by McClendon director Richard Campbell, who convinced him to come to New York and audition for Jeb, a play by Robert Ardrey. At age 28, Davis won the lead role and made his Broadway debut. He earned favorable reviews as a disabled veteran attempting to succeed as an adding-machine operator in racist Louisiana, but the play itself was panned and lasted only nine performances. Though it bombed at the box office, Jeb was far from a total loss; it put Davis on the theatrical map, and it was in the cast of Jeb that Davis met Ruby Ann Wallace, whose stage name was Ruby Dee. The two became close and took roles with the touring company of Anna Lucasta. They were married on December 9, 1948. "Ruby was my colleague," Davis told Newsday, "and then she became my friend and eventually my wife."

After his marriage, Davis continued to appear in plays and, as time progressed, he took roles in television and films. Presentations like Stevedore and No Time for Sergeants paid the bills while others, like No Way Out —the powerful film about racial violence with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee—Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and Kraft Theater's 1955 television presentation of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones provided roles into which Davis could sink his teeth. Later, he remembered what an all-encompassing political and social—as well as professional—life the theater was. "In our day, theater was a serious commitment," he told the Milwaukee Journal. "That was the style of the times.… In New York City, you acted in the theater, and afterward, you went to a [civil rights movement] party for a lynching victim later that evening. [Actor Marlon] Brando was in one corner and [actor-director] Orson Welles was in the other corner. It was the same at home. I was born in the South, and my parents were always involved in something, raising money for this cause or that protest."

Noted Poor Treatment of Blacks

Despite some good roles, Davis was not happy with his treatment or that of blacks in general. "I knew I was going to be rejected so I had very low expectations," he revealed in Blacks in American Film and Television. "But rejection did sting. In the theater it took a peculiar form—of having to compete with your peers, like I did for The Green Pastures on Broadway, to fight to say words you were ashamed of. Ruby and I came along at a time when being black was not yet fashionable. There was little in the theater for us except to carry silver trays."

At a Glance …

Born Raiford Chatman Davis on December 18, 1917, in Cogdell, GA; died on February 4, 2005, in Miami, FL; son of Kince Charles (a railway construction worker) and Laura Davis; married Ruby Ann Wallace (Ruby Dee; an actress) on December 9, 1948; children: Nora, Guy, Lavern (Hasna). Education : Howard University, BA, 1939. Military Service : US Army, 1942-1945.

Career: Member of Rose McClendon Players, 1938-1941; actor, 1946-2005; director, 1970-2005; social activist, 1917-2005.

Awards: Emmy nomination for performance in Teacher Teacher, 1969; NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame, inductee, 1989; Theater Hall of Fame, inductee, 1994; U.S. National Medal for the Arts, 1995; NAACP Image Award, for "Promised Land" miniseries, 1996; New York Urban League Frederick Douglass Award, 2001; Screen Actor's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, 2001; Kennedy Center Honor, shared with Ruby Dee, 2004.

But Broadway was not the only place in which Davis could exercise his considerable talents. "We have always been involved in black theater, in the way that we saw [it]," Davis told American Visions. "Ruby and I took our notebooks and created our own theater. We went out into the marketplace, then to churches, to the schools and did what we could theatrically. Our relationship with black theater has always been continuous. It is just that we had to sometimes define what it is we meant by black theater." Davis and Dee's commitment to the black community went beyond staging dramas; in 1963 they acted as official hosts for the legendary civil rights March on Washington. Throughout the 1950s and '60s they stayed in constant contact with African-American activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X (at whose funerals Davis delivered the eulogy), Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. "Protest invigorated Davis," according to People. "Like exercise strengthens the body, struggle strengthens the character," Davis told People in a 1998 interview quoted in the magazine's obituary for him.

Davis and Dee made every effort to build a normal family life for their three children, Hasna, Guy, and Nora. Living in a working-class neighborhood of Mount Vernon, New York, they preserved the family unit, which is so often distorted by the pressures of show business. "I think if there is anything to be said, our children were able at all levels and at all times to participate fully in the life we led," Davis told American Visions. "We didn't live a life away from them. There wasn't a career outside of the house from which they were barred. We managed to function as a family—with a sense of 'us-ness.'"

Realized His Dream of
Being a Writer

Davis, who had never ceased to regard himself primarily as a writer, continued writing and shopping his plays and screenplays to producers throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His play Alice in Wonder appeared in New York in 1952. The drama, which recreated the Senator Joe McCarthy era of Cold-War communist-hunting, was revised and expanded the following year as The Big Deal but was dimly received. It was not until 1961 that Davis's writing abilities brought him real success. Purlie Victorious premiered September 28, 1961, at New York City's Cort Theatre. A comedy about an itinerant black preacher who attempts to claim his inheritance and establish an integrated church, Purlie Victorious enjoyed a long and interesting life; it ran more than seven months in New York City and was later revived first as a motion picture called Gone Are the Days and then as the Broadway musical Purlie. Despite its relatively long run in its first incarnation, Purlie Victorious made little money. Whites did not attend it and without white support, a black theater of that era could not succeed in New York.

Davis spent much of the 1960s earning his bread and butter in movies and in episodes of television shows like The Defenders, The Doctors, The Fugitive, and Bonanza. It was not the kind of work he relished. "I'm not a great actor," he told Blacks in American Film and Television. "I've never devoted myself to my craft with the intensity Ruby has. I've always felt I'd rather be a writer. But we had to make a living." Despite this self-criticism, Pauline Kael, film critic for the New Yorker, wrote that Davis, "in such movies as The Hill and The Scalphunters, brought a stronger presence to his roles than white actors did, and a deeper joy. What a face for the camera. He was a natural king."

As the 1960s progressed, Davis began receiving the kind of attention he deserved; in 1968 his play Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir was produced at the University of California at Santa Barbara and in 1969, he received an Emmy nomination for his performance in the teleplay Teacher Teacher. By 1970 he had become one of the busiest African Americans in the entertainment industry. He made his debut as a film director with Cotton Comes to Harlem, adapted Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka's Kongi's Harvest for the screen, and his play Purlie Victorious returned to Broadway as the musical smash Purlie.

Cotton Comes to Harlem was a landmark of black cinema. One of the first black films to make money from a mainstream audience, it opened the way for a wave of pictures about blacks now known as "blaxploitation" films. Unlike that of later, darker movies like Shaft, Davis's vision was more comic. Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Film and Television, attested of Cotton, "A joyousness ran through the film that lured audiences around the country into the theaters." Clive Barnes of the New York Times called Purlie, which opened at the Broadway Theater on March 15, 1970, "by far the most successful and richest of all black musicals," describing the production as "strong" and "so magnificent" and praising "the depth of the characterization and the salty wit of the dialogue."

Through the mid-1970s Davis continued to direct. While his films—Black Girl, Gordon's War, and Countdown at Kusini —were received unevenly, there was a significance to his work that critics could not ignore. Bogle commented that "in a strange way…Davis could be called one of the more serious black directors of his era; political undercurrents [ran] throughout much of his work. He…never settled for simply making a standard action movie.… [He] hoped to take black American cinema into a new, more politically oriented direction [and] for that he has to be commended."

Hit His Stride

Davis spent the remainder of the 1970s pursuing diverse interests. From 1974 until 1978 he and his wife co-hosted the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour on radio. In 1976 he appeared in the film Let's Do It Again. Also that year, his play Escape to Freedom: A Play About Young Frederick Douglass was produced at New York City's Town Hall. In 1981, he and Ruby began appearing in With Ossie and Ruby on PBS. Through their company, Emmalyn II Productions, they co-produced the show with two public television stations. The program, which presented a broad mix of material, ran for three years. "It was one of the highlights of our lives because it gave us the opportunity to do shows by authors we respect," Dee told the Greensboro News and Record.

With their children, Davis and Dee worked in the context of Emmalyn II through much of the 1980s, producing a variety of programs including Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum and A Walk Through History for PBS. Far from withdrawing from acting, though, Davis continued working on the stage, in film, and on television. In 1986 he starred in a production of Tony Award-Winning American dramatist Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport at actor Burt Reynolds's Jupiter Theater in Florida. Davis appeared in Spike Lee's 1988 film School Daze and in 1989, he played "the mayor" in Lee's controversial and acclaimed Do the Right Thing. It was a role in which he presided not only over the street where the film's action took place but over the coming of age of a new generation of black filmmakers.

When he was past 70 and in the public eye more than ever for his stunning performance as the Good Reverend Dr. Purify in Lee's Jungle Fever, as well as for his regular spot as Burt Reynolds's best friend on television's Evening Shade, Davis reflected on his career, telling American Visions, "I was able to hang on to the gifts of my childhood longer than normal, to daydream, to think of things in the imagination, to play and be a play actor."

In 1992 Davis exercised his gifts as a novelist when he published a story for young adults called Just Like Martin. Centered on the activities of a small-town Alabama church congregation during the civil rights movement, Davis's first foray into fiction is "an attempt to recapture some sense of the black church as a political and moral base in the fight against racism," according to Publishers Weekly contributor Calvin Reid. Of his decision to move in this direction, Davis told Reid, "I can move between these different disciplines because I am essentially a storyteller, and the story I want to tell is about black people. Sometimes I sing the story, sometimes I dance it, sometimes I tell tall tales about it, but I always want to share my great satisfaction at being a black man at this time in history."

Fondly Remembered

On February 4, 2005, while working on the film Retirement in Miami, Florida, Ossie Davis died of natural causes at age 87. His family, friends, and fans gathered by the thousands at a Manhattan church to pay their respects to the acting legend. The funeral was attended by such well-known people as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, Pulitzer Prize winner Maya Angelou, film director Spike Lee, musician Wynton Marsalis, and actors Alan Alda and Burt Reynolds. Many mourners noted Davis's commitment to his art and his unfailing support of his community. The work of Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee consistently "explored and celebrated the lessons of black history in the United States, making the couple, over the decades, an inspiration and iconic presence in contemporary African American culture," as the Kennedy Center Web site noted. He was remembered as "a giant" and "a noble warrior," according to National Public Radio, and as an "American treasure," by the Actors' Equity Association, according to MSNBC. Harry Belafonte, a family friend for sixty years eulogized Davis, saying, as quoted in the Houston Chronicle : "It is hard to fathom that we will no longer be able to call on his wisdom, his humor, his loyalty and his moral strength to guide us in the choices that are yet to be made and the battles that are yet to be fought. But how fortunate we were to have him as long as we did."

Selected works

Books

With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together (memoir), William Morrow, 1998.

Just Like Martin (fiction), Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Films

Gone Are the Days, Trans Lux, 1963.

(With Arnold Perl; and director) Cotton Comes to Harlem, United Artists, 1970.

(And director) Kongi's Harvest (adapted from work by Wole Soyinka), Calpenny Films Nigeria Ltd., 1970.

Harry and Son, 1984.

School Daze, 1988.

Do the Right Thing, 1989.

Grumpy Old Men, 1993.

She Hate Me, 2004.

Radio

The Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, mid-1970s.

Plays

(And director) Goldbrickers of 1944 (produced in Liberia), 1944.

Alice in Wonder (produced at Elks Community Theater, 1952; revised and produced as The Big Deal at New Playwrights Theater, New York City, 1953).

Purlie Victorious (produced at Cort Theatre, New York City), 1961.

Curtain Call, Mr. Aldridge, Sir (produced at University of California at Santa Barbara), 1968.

(With Philip Rose, Peter Udell, and Gary Geld) Purlie (produced at Broadway Theater, New York City), 1970.

Escape to Freedom: A Play About Young Frederick Douglass (produced at Town Hall, New York City), 1976.

Langston: A Play, Delacorte, 1982.

Television

The Emperor Jones, 1955.

The Outsider, 1967.

Today Is Ours, CBS-TV, 1974.

Roots: The Next Generation, 1979.

We'll Take Manhattan, 1990.

The Stand, 1994.

Miss Evers' Boys, 1997.

Finding Buck McHenry, 2000.

Other

Ossie Davis performed in over 100 plays, films, and radio programs from the 1940s until his death in 2005.

Sources

Books

Bogle, Donald, Blacks in American Film and Television, Garland, 1988.

Funke, Lewis, The Curtain Rises—The Story of Ossie Davis, Grosset & Dunlap, 1971.

Periodicals

American Visions, April/May 1992.

Daily News (New York), February 12, 2005.

Greensboro News and Record (North Carolina), August 17, 1989.

Guardian (London), February 8, 2005.

Houston Chronicle, February 14, 2005.

Jet, February 28, 2005.

Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1989.

Milwaukee Journal, June 9, 1991.

Newsday, March 24, 1987.

New York Post, February 13, 2005.

New York Times, June 30, 1989.

Palm Beach Post (Florida), May 10, 1988.

People, February 21, 2005.

Publishers Weekly, December 28, 1992.

Sarasota Herald Tribune, February 20, 2005.

Washington Times, February 14, 2005.

On-line

"Biography: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee," Indiana University, http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/200.html (March 11, 2005).

"Biography: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee," Kennedy Center, www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/index.cfm?fuseaction=showIndividual&entitY_id=12124&source_type=A (March 11, 2005).

"Morning Edition: Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee," National Public Radio, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1119605 (March 11, 2005).

"Ossie Davis Found Dead in Miami Hotel Room," MSNBC, http://msnbc.msn.com/ID/6914059/ (March 11, 2005).

"Remembrances: Ossie Davis," National Public Radio, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4486027 (March 11, 2005).

—Jordan Wankoff and

Sara Pendergast

Ossie Davis

Born: December 18, 1917
Cogdell, Georgia
African American actor, playwright, director, and activist

Ossie Davis is a leading African American playwright, actor, director, and television and movie star. He was a part of the civil rights movement and helped lead the way for a new generation of African American film directors.

Early life

Ossie Davis was born in Cogdell, Georgia, on December 18, 1917, the oldest of five children of Kince Charles Davis and Laura Cooper Davis. He grew up in Waycross, Georgia. His father was a railroad construction engineer who entertained his family by telling stories. While still attending Central High School in Waycross, Davis decided to become a writer after witnessing how badly prejudiced white people treated his father. At Howard University in Washington, D.C., Davis was encouraged to pursue an acting career. He left college after his junior year and joined an acting group in Harlem in New York City. He also took part in the American Negro Theater, founded there in 1940.

Stage and screen career

Davis made his debut in the play Joy Exceeding Glory (1941). In 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army to serve during World War II (1939–45; a war fought between the Axis—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States). He worked in Liberia with the Medical Department and also wrote and produced shows. After the war he returned to the stage, playing his first Broadway role in Jeb (1946). While performing in this show he met actress Ruby Dee (1924–), and they were married two years later.

Davis's first movie role was in No Way Out (1950). This was followed by Broadway performances in No Time for Sergeants, Raisin in the Sun, and Jamaica. Other movie roles included The Cardinal, Shock Treatment, and Slaves. He was also one of the first African American actors to work regularly in television, appearing in dramas and on such regular series as The Defenders and The Nurses. Davis also wrote television scripts.

Davis and Ruby Dee acted together many times on the stage, in television, and in movies. They starred in Davis's own play Purlie Victorious (1961) and in the movie based on it, Gone Are the Days. Purlie Victorious was published and also reprinted in collections of plays. Davis went on to coauthor the musical version of the play, Purlie (1970), which enjoyed great success during its Broadway run.

Director and writer

In the late 1960s Davis became one of the few African American film directors when he worked on Cotton Comes to Harlem and other films. With Ruby Dee he appeared on stage and television, reading the poetry of famous African Americans, and he made recordings of African American literature. One of his most famous moments was his tribute to Malcolm X (1925–1965) in 1965, when he called the slain Muslim leader "Our Shining Black Prince." Davis also frequently gave lectures and readings at universities and schools.

Davis's published essays include "The Wonderful World of Law and Order," "The Flight from Broadway," and "Plays of Insight Are Needed to Make the Stage Vital in Our Lives." He also wrote the play Last Dance for Sybil and a musical version of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Davis has a deep love for his people. He is an example of African American pride, and he devoted much time and talent to the civil rights movement (a mass movement starting from the mid-1900s that led to the end of segregation [separation based on race] and equal rights for African Americans) in America. He received a number of awards, including the Mississippi Democratic Party Citation, the Howard University Alumni Achievement Award in dramatics, and the Frederick A. Douglass (c. 1817–1895) Award (with Ruby Dee) from the New York Urban League. The Davises have three children and make their home in New Rochelle, New York.

Later years

In his later years Davis has remained very active, mostly in television. He appeared on the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program With Ossie and Ruby, as well as on the popular series Evening Shade. He also helped pave the way for a new generation of African American film directors, led by Spike Lee (1957–). Davis performed in three of Lee's films, including Do the Right Thing (1989). Davis even tried his hand at writing fiction. His novel Just Like Martin, a tribute to the civil rights movement, was published in 1992.

In January 1999 Davis and his wife Ruby Dee celebrated fifty years of marriage at a benefit for community theaters in New York City. Later that year they were among several people arrested while protesting the shooting of an unarmed West African immigrant by New York City police officers. In 2001 Davis and Dee were honored with a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award at ceremonies held in Los Angeles, California.

For More Information

Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Davis, Ossie, and Ruby Dee. With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. New York: W. Morrow, 1998.

Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama: The Story of the American Negro in the Theatre. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Ossie Davis

Born Raiford Chatman Davis, December 18, 1917, in Cogdell, GA; died of natural causes, February 4, 2005, in Miami Beach, FL. Actor. Actor Ossie Davis, along with his wife, Ruby Dee, were pioneers in African-American theater and film. Davis had a lengthy career, with more than 120 screen credits to his name, and was known for the subtle strength of character he projected through a dignified, fatherly demeanor and his memorably baritone voice.

Born in 1917, Davis came from rural Georgia, and was the first of five children in his family. He real name was Raiford Chatman Davis, shortened to just the initials "R.C.," but when his mother registered his birth at the country records office, the clerk misheard her and wrote down "Ossie" instead; she was too intimidated, at a time of deep racial divisions in the American South, to correct it. Davis' father was a railroad construction supervisor, an unusual post for a black man to hold, and was once warned by the local chapter of the white-supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, to mind his place. The Davis parents encouraged their son to get an education, and by the time he finished high school he had scholarship offers from two black colleges, but could not afford to pay his share of the tuition and board. By then, the Great Depression had struck, and the family was struggling financially. Eventually Davis hitchhiked to Washington, D.C., where he stayed with relatives while attending Howard University.

Davis warmed to two subjects at Howard, literature and the theater, and decided to move to Harlem in 1939 before completing his degree. There, he joined the Rose McClendon Players, a theater group, and supported himself with menial jobs—though he admitted to sleeping on the occasional park bench when money was truly scarce. After appearing in the 1940 Broadway production of the Harlem-set On Strivers Row, Davis served in the U.S. Army during World War II as a medical-corps technician in Africa. Back in civilian life, he was cast in the title role of a 1946 Broadway play about a returning war veteran, Jeb. During rehearsals he met Dee, and the two wed in 1948. They were often cast together as husband and wife, and in later years had become the honorary grandparents for an entire generation of African-American entertainers. One of their most memorable joint roles came in the 1991 Spike Lee film, Jungle Fever, as a devout, gospel music-loving minister and his wife, who are virtually paralyzed by their son's increasing drug addiction.

Davis and his wife began their careers during a time when black actors were rarely cast in films outside of domestic-servant roles. Even in the early years of television, career-building parts were scarce, but Davis was able to land such roles as the lead in a Eugene O'Neill play, The Emperor Jones, for a 1955 Kraft Television Playhouse event. As he said many years later in an interview, "There are ways you can make yourself a more saleable commodity. I didn't pursue those ways," London Independent writer Stephen Bourne quoted him as saying. He and Dee, he continued, "did build careers for ourselves and in the process did many theatrical things… on street corners, churches, union halls, schools. And, in doing it our way, we didn't have to sell more of ourselves than we could get back before the sun went down."

In addition to their stage and screen work, Davis and Dee were deeply committed political and civilrights activists. They supported a host of causes, and served as the joint emcees for the 1963 March on Washington, during which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Davis spoke at King's 1968 funeral, and had also delivered the eulogy for slain leader Malcolm X in 1965. He reprised the latter tribute for Spike Lee's 1992 biopic, Malcolm X.

Among Davis' impressive credits were his film debut alongside Sidney Poitier in the 1950 crime thriller No Way Out, and as Poitier's successor in the role of Walter Lee in the acclaimed Broadway drama A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. He wrote the play Purlie Victorious in the early 1960s, a work that satirized race relations in the South and went on to become the Broadway musical Purlie. He also directed the 1970 film Cotton Comes to Harlem, about two African-American police officers in Harlem, which helped launch a new black film movement.

Davis and Dee, who had three children together, were rarely separated, but Davis was in Miami Beach in early February of 2005, shooting a new film titled Retirement with co-stars Peter Falk and George Segal; Dee was on location in New Zealand also shooting a film. Davis' hotel was notified when his grandson failed to reach him on February 4, 2005. He had apparently died of natural causes at the age of 87. Survivors include his children Nora, Guy, and Hasna, and seven grandchildren, but his legacy would run deeper, actor Harry Belafonte told Elaine Woo of the Los Angeles Times. Noting that the actor and activist personally knew not only Dr. King and Malcolm X., but Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois as well, Belafonte called Davis "the embodiment of all those courageous people. I think he worked very hard at passing on to subsequent generations not only a deep and rich sense of their history but encouraged them to become more noble in their demands of life, governance and society." Sources: CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/02/04/obit.davis.ap/index. html (February 4, 2005); Entertainment Weekly, February 18, 2005, p. 15; Independent (London), February 7, 2005, p. 34; Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2005, p. A1, p. A21; New York Times, February 4, 2005, p. A14; February 9, 2005, p. A2; People, February 21, 2005, pp. 73-74; USA Today, February 7, 2005, p. 2D.

—CarolBrennan

Davis, Ossie

December 18, 1917
February 4, 2005

Actor and playwright Ossie Davis was born in Cogdell, Georgia, to Kince Charles Davis, a railroad construction worker, and Laura Cooper Davis. After finishing high school in Waycross, Georgia, he hitchhiked north and attended Howard University. In 1937 Davis left Howard and went to New York City, where he worked at odd jobs before joining Harlem's Rose McClendon Players in 1939.

Davis was drafted into the army in 1942, and after his discharge in 1945 he again pursued his acting career. In 1946 he successfully auditioned for Robert Ardrey's Jeb, in which he starred opposite actress Ruby Dee. Davis and Dee were married in 1948.

In 1953 Davis wrote Alice in Wonder, a one-act play produced in Harlem that dealt with the politics of the Mc-Carthy era. Blacklisted for left-wing associations, Davis and Dee supported themselves by staging readings at colleges. In 1955 Davis starred in a television production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and two years later appeared on Broadway opposite Lena Horne in Jamaica!

In the 1960s Davis achieved broad success in the performing arts. In 1960 he replaced Sidney Poitier and appeared with Ruby Dee in Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. The following year, his play Purlie Victorious, a satire on southern racism, opened on Broadway to an enthusiastic response. Davis also wrote and starred in the film version of Purlie Victorious, entitled Gone Are the Days (1963). He appeared in several other films during this period, including The Cardinal (1963), The Hill (1964), The Scalphunters (1968), and Slaves (1969). He also appeared on several television shows, wrote an episode for the popular series East Side/West Side, and narrated National Education Television's History of the Negro People (1965). In 1969 Davis was nominated for an Emmy award for his performance in the Hallmark Hall of Fame special Teacher, Teacher. That same year Davis directed, cowrote, and acted in the film Cotton Comes to Harlem, based on a novel by Chester Himes.

During these years, Davis continued his political activities. In 1962 he testified before Congress on racial discrimination in the theater and joined the advisory board of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The following year he wrote a skit for the 1963 March on Washington, and in 1965 he delivered a eulogy at the funeral of his friend, Malcolm X. In 1972 he served as chairman of the Angela Davis Defense Fund. While Davis has strong affinities with black nationalism, he has nonetheless rejected black racism and separatism.

Through the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, Davis continued his performing career, notably in a radio series, the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Hour (1974–1976); in the public television series With Ossie and Ruby (1981); in the role of Martin Luther King, Sr., in Abby Mann's television miniseries King (1977); and in the Spike Lee films Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), and I'm Not Rappaport (1996). Throughout the early 1990s, he was a semiregular on the television series Evening Shade. Davis also has written several children's books, which include plays based on the lives of Frederick Douglass and Langston Hughes, and a novel, Just Like Martin (1992), about a southern boy, inspired by the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1998 Davis celebrated his fiftieth wedding anniversary with Ruby Dee by publishing a joint memoir, With Ossie and Ruby Dee: In This Life Together. His play A Last Dance for Sybil was produced off-Broadway in 2002. Davis continues to take on roles in films and television shows, including episodes of such series as JAG, Third Watch, and Touched by an Angel.

In December 2004 the Kennedy Center honored Davis with a lifetime achievement award. Davis died at age eighty-seven on February 4, 2005.

See also Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); Hansberry, Lorraine; Himes, Chester; Lee, Spike; Malcolm X; Poitier, Sidney

Bibliography

Davis, Ossie, and Ruby Dee. With Ossie and Ruby Dee: In This Life Together. New York: Morrow, 1998.

Landay, Eileen. Black Film Stars. New York: Drake, 1973.

McMurray, Emily J., and Owen O'Donnell, eds. Contemporary Theater, Film and Television. Detroit: Gale, 1992.

susan mcintosh (1996)

greg robinson (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005