Love, Art, and Activism: RIP Ruby Dee

Artist and activist Ruby Dee departed this life on June 11, 2014 at the age of 91, leaving her three children to mourn her passing. But, these few word won't explain this power house and her contribution to the world at large.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1922, Ruby was raised in modest circumstances by her father, a cook, waiter, and porter. When her mother left the family, her father remarried a school teacher. Ruby went on to attain a degree in romance languages from Hunter College in 1945. In 2009, She received an honorary degree from Princeton University.

Actress, poet, playwright, screenwriter, journalist and activist-these titles tell us a bit more about her life and her work. She was the recipient of Grammy, Emmy, Obie, Drama Desk, Screen Actors Guild Award, and Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Awards as well as the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. Known for her roles in A Raisin in the Sun (1961) and  Do The Right Thing (1989), Ruby Dee was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in American Gangster (2007). Her career in acting crossed all major forms of media over a span of eight decades. She received eight Emmy nominations.

Ruby Wallace married blues singer Frankie Dee Brown in 1941, and began using his middle name as her stage name. The couple divorced in 1945. Three years later she married actor Ossie Davis, who she met while costarring in the 1946 Broadway play Jeb. Together, Dee and Davis wrote an autobiography in which they discussed their political activism and their decision to have an open marriage (later changing their minds). Together they had three children: son, blues musician Guy Davis, and two daughters, Nora Day and Hasna Muhammad. Dee was a breast cancer survivor of more than three decades.

Dee and Davis were well-known civil rights activists. Dee was a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the NAACP, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Delta Sigma Theta sorority and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1963, Dee emceed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Dee and Davis were both personal friends of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, with Davis giving the eulogy at Malcolm X's funeral in 1965. In 1970, she won the Frederick Douglass Award from the New York Urban League.


In early 2003, The Nation published "Not In My Name", an open proclamation vowing opposition to the impending US invasion of Iraq. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis were among the signatories, along with Robert Altman, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sarandon and Howard Zinn, among others.

 

In a statement, Gil Robertson IV of the African American Film Critics Association said,
"Throughout her seven-decade career, Ms Dee embraced different creative platforms with her various interpretations of black womanhood and also used her gifts to champion for Human Rights. Her strength, courage and beauty will be greatly missed." In tribute to Ruby Dee, I invite you to recall these words from Maya Angelou's poem "Phenomenal Woman":

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.

 I don’t shout or jump about
 Or have to talk real loud.

 When you see me passing
 It ought to make you proud.

 I say,

 It’s in the click of my heels,
 The bend of my hair,

 the palm of my hand,
 The need of my care,

‘Cause I’m a woman

 Phenomenally.

 Phenomenal woman,

 That’s me.

Rest in Peace, brave warrior, Ruby Dee.

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