Good Soldiers

When Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis appear at Unity Temple on Thursday, September 13, the list of topics they might broach is endless. Members of the American Negro Theatre in their careers’ infancy, they met doing the Broadway play Jeb in 1945 and “married three years later on a rehearsal-free day,” they write in With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, published in 1998 to coincide with their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

With a filmography that ranges from The Jackie Robinson Story to most of Spike Lee’s movies, and an equally rich history as social activists, it seems there’s little the famed couple hasn’t done. Brushing off grandiosity, however, Dee once described herself and her husband as “foot soldiers, ready, willing and able to do our part in the struggle.”

In the 1950s, it would not have been unusual for them to perform an O’Neill play in a theater that had to house them in segregated quarters. Once the volatile ’60s arrived and eased into the ’70s, their options opened up. Their film credits during this time included the groundbreaking TV miniseries Roots and the seminal movie Cotton Comes to Harlem, which Davis directed.

The stage has been just as kind to them. In Dee’s one-woman show, My One Good Nerve, she recited salty versions of classic nursery rhymes, such as, “Jack and Jill moved up on a hill to get away from slaughter. And things were going real swell until a minority married their daughter.”

So they deserve to be hailed as much for their politics as their theatrics. Davis eulogized Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X at their funerals (and played himself doing so in Spike Lee’s Malcolm X), and the couple was arrested outside New York’s police headquarters protesting the shooting of Amadou Diallo.

“There are a lot of people who don’t exactly know what to do or how to react to these things,” Davis has said. “Then they saw us do it [and it] clarified for them what they thought they should do. That’s the highest satisfaction you can get … as activists.”