Davis, Ossie

Source:

 African American National Biography

Davis, Ossie

(18 Dec. 1917–4 Feb. 2005),

writer, actor, and director, was born in Cogdell, Georgia, the oldest of four children of Kince Charles Davis, an herb doctor and Bible scholar, and Laura Cooper. Ossie's mother intended to name him “R.C.,” after his paternal grandfather, Raiford Chatman Davis, but when the clerk at Clinch County courthouse thought she said “Ossie,” Laura did not argue with him, because he was white.

Ossie was attacked and humiliated while in high school by two white policemen, who took him to their precinct and doused him with cane syrup. Laughing, they gave the teenager several hunks of peanut brittle and released him. He never reported the incident but its memory contributed to his sensibilities and politics. In 1934 Ossie graduated from Center High School in Waycross, Georgia, and even though he received scholarships to attend Savannah State College and Tuskegee Institute he did not have the minimal financial resources to take advantage of them. Instead, he spent a year clerking at his father's pharmacy in Valdosta, Georgia, before hitchhiking to Howard University, in Washington, D.C. Ossie spent the next four years at Howard, but he did not receive a degree, as he had taken only the classes that appealed to him. However, at Howard, Ossie met the poet and scholar Sterling Brown, who introduced him to the work of Langston Hughes and Countée Cullen. Brown, Ossie later wrote, showed him that the “interest of my people was at stake, and I could only be a hero by serving their urgent cause. The Struggle opened a new chapter in my imagination” (Davis and Dee, 74–75). Alain Locke, his Howard theater teacher, began by introducing him to the world of black drama and ended up, according to Ossie, “giving me my life.”

Another early influence on Ossie was Eldon Stuart Medas, leader of a West Indian student bull-session group at Howard, who showed Ossie how to love English poets and playwrights and how to use them to win political arguments. As Ossie was preparing to leave Howard in 1939, he attended the 16 April concert given by Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This event, he later reflected, “married in my mind forever the performing arts as a weapon in the struggle for freedom…. It reminded me that whatever I said and whatever I did as an artist was an integral part of my people's struggle to be free” (Davis and Dee, 86–87).

Ossie Davis, playwright and actor, as Gabriel in The Green Pastures, 12 April 1951. (Library of Congress/Carl Van Vechten, photographer.)

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Davis moved to Harlem at the suggestion of Locke, who recommended that the budding playwright apprentice himself to Dick Campbell, founder and artistic director of the Rose McClendon Players (RMP). At the RMP, Davis learned the fundamentals of acting and stagecraft and appeared in four plays between 1939 and 1941, including Booker T. Washington, a play by William Ashley starring Dooley Wilson. Davis later said of the RMP that “it cultivated and serviced the Harlem Community with high-grade entertainment that gave Negroes a chance to see their own lives … [and gave] Negro actors, stage managers, set designers, and assorted technicians, a chance to learn and practice their craft under the best instruction” (Davis, “The Flight from Broadway,” 15).

In 1942 Davis's career was interrupted when he was drafted during World War II; he served as a medic in Liberia until 1945, after which he returned to New York, where the director Herman Shumlin cast him as the lead in Robert Ardrey's play Jeb. The drama, the story of a returning African American veteran who faces down the Ku Klux Klan to marry his girlfriend, costarred Ruby Dee. Davis and Dee appeared together again later that year in the national tour of Anna Lucasta and in 1948 at the Lyceum Theater in The Smile of the World. The couple married in 1948 and had three children: Nora, Guy, and Hasna.

Although Davis performed in fifteen plays between 1948 and 1957—including Marc Connelly's Green Pastures (1951) and Jamaica (1958) opposite Lena Horne on Broadway, for which he received a Tony Award nomination—he thought of himself principally as a playwright. Since 1939, however, he had been struggling to complete “Leonidas Is Fallen,” the story of a slave hero—modeled after the slave revolt leaders Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner—who dies fighting for his freedom. Davis hoped to create a “new kind of drama,” different from contemporary black musical comedies and adaptations. During this period, Davis attended meetings of the Young Communist League in Harlem, paying close attention to the political speakers but also to the writers, from whom he hoped to find literary, as well as political, solutions. Davis never became a Communist, but he eventually became a playwright, with help from a playwriting class at Columbia University in 1947.

When Davis replaced Sidney Poitier opposite Dee in A Raisin in the Sun, it encouraged him to finish his play, Purlie Victorious (1961), which Davis described as the “adventures of Negro manhood in search of itself in a world for white folks only,” that revealed “a world that emasculated me, as it does all Negro men … and taught me to gleefully accept that emasculation as the highest honor America could bestow” (Davis, “Purlie Told Me!” 155–156). In 1963 Davis adapted the play into a film, Gone Are the Days, in which he and Dee starred. In 1970 he retooled the play as a musical for Broadway, Purlie, which was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Musical.

Davis's film and television work began in 1950 with the film No Way Out, in which he starred with Dee. Over the next fifty years, working with many of America's best filmmakers and performers, he appeared in more than one hundred film and television projects, including The Joe Louis Story (1953); The Cardinal (1963), directed by Otto Preminger; The Hill (1965), directed by Sidney Lumet; A Man Called Adam (1966), featuring Sammy Davis Jr., Cicely Tyson, and Louis Armstrong; The Scalphunters (1968), directed by Sidney Pollack; Let's Do It Again (1975), directed by Sidney Poitier and starring Poitier and Bill Cosby; Harry and Son (1984), directed by Paul Newman; and I'm Not Rappaport (1996), costarring Walter Matthau. Davis maintained a particularly rich creative relationship with the filmmaker Spike Lee, appearing in School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), and Get on the Bus (1996).

In addition to his many television guest appearances, Davis had recurring roles in a number of television series, including the detective drama The Outsider (1967); B. L. Stryker (1989–1990), opposite Burt Reynolds; Evening Shade (1990–1994); and The Promised Land (1996). He starred in numerous television dramas and miniseries, including many African American–themed works, such as Roots (1979), which also featured Dee; Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1981); and King (1978), in which he played Martin Luther King Sr. Davis's writing credits include For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story (1983), which he cowrote with Myrlie Evers-Williams for American Playhouse, and three children's books: Just like Martin (1992) about Martin Luthur King Jr.; Escape to Freedom: A Play about Young Frederick Douglass (1978), winner of the Jane Addams Children's Book Award and the American Library Association's Coretta Scott King Award; and Langston, a Play (1982).

In 1970 Davis directed his first film, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), an adaptation of Chester Himes's detective novel about an armed robbery at a Back-to-Africa rally in Harlem. The commercial success of Cotton, for which Davis also wrote the screenplay and several songs, paved the way for what became known as the “blaxploitation” films of the 1970s. Although he was wary of many of the blaxploitation films, Davis agreed with the critic Clayton Riley that they constituted “part of a stage of development for a number of people” (Riley, “On the Film Critic,” Black Creation, 1972, 15), and he agreed to direct the film adaptation of J. E. Franklin's play Black Girl in 1972. Davis chose the project—about a high school dropout who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer but settles for dancing in a bar—in order to demonstrate to Hollywood and to black filmmakers, in particular, that black film could be both entertaining and reflective of the lives of real African Americans. In the early 1970s Davis directed Kongi's Harvest (1971), Gordon's War (1973), and Countdown at Kusini (1976), which he also wrote, and he established the Third World Cinema Corporation, a New York–based production company that trained African Americans and Latinos for film and television production jobs.

In 1980 Davis and Dee founded their own production company, Emmalyn II Productions Company. Together they produced and hosted three seasons of the critically acclaimed PBS television series With Ossie and Ruby and three years of the Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee Story Hour, a radio broadcast for the National Black Network. The couple has participated, separately and together, in the creation of numerous documentary and nonfiction projects, including Martin Luther King: The Dream and the Drum; Mississippi, America; and A Walk through the 20th Century with Bill Moyers for PBS. In 1998 they cowrote an autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together. In 2002 Davis completed a new play, A Last Dance for Sybil, which ran in New York starring Dee.

Davis and Dee's commitment to civil rights and humanitarian causes was central to their life and work. They labored to introduce staged productions and readings into schools, unions, community centers, and, especially, black churches, because they were repositories “of all we thought precious and worthy to be passed on to our children” (Davis and Dee, 253). In the 1950s they risked their careers by stridently resisting Senator Joseph McCarthy's blacklisting activities. Highly active and visible during the civil rights movement, they served as masters of ceremonies for the 1963 March on Washington, and in 1964 they helped establish Artists for Freedom, which donated money to civil rights organizations in the name of the four little girls killed in Birmingham, Alabama. Davis's stirring eulogy at the 1965 funeral of Malcolm X flawlessly articulated black America's loss: “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…. Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.” Davis and Dee's political work continued unabated over the next decades.

In addition to their many individual honors, Davis and Dee jointly received the Actors' Equity Association Paul Robeson Award (1975), the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle Award (1994), and induction into the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame (1989). In 1995 they were awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton, and in 2000 they received the Screen Actors Guild's highest honor, the Life Achievement Award.

Davis was found dead of natural causes in a hotel room in Miami, where he was working on a film titled Retirement. His last role was on the groundbreaking Showtime series The L Word, where he played a dying character struggling to accept his daughter's sexuality. Ruby Dee was present during the filming of his death scene, which aired shortly after his own death on 4 February 2005.

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