“Do the right thing,” said Da Mayor, the elderly street sage from Spike Lee’s masterpiece film about a hot summer day in Harlem. Ossie Davis, who played Da Mayor, did precisely the “right thing” his entire life, except it was primarily to the Left in struggles against racial injustice and oppression. At 87, the famous Black stage and film actor has departed, leaving behind his loving partner, actress Ruby Dee.

Together, Dee and Davis symbolized the amazing potential celebrity has for contributing to progressive movements while bridging into mainstream channels of popular culture. Only two months before his death, Davis was honored at the Kennedy Center alongside Dee for their contributions as a couple to both the big screen and the stage and their prolific legacy of work breaking down barriers for African American entertainers. It was a nationally televised event, and delivered to a prime time network audience.

According to the Washington Post, only two other celebrity acting couples had ever been jointly honored before: Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn. Over his career, Davis’s work has included such films as his first, No Way Out in 1950, in which he co-starred with Dee. He has starred in numerous Spike Lee films like JungleFever, and Get on the Bus as well as films like Grumpy Old Men and for television, Alex Haley’s Roots: The Next Generation. On Broadway, Davis had the title role in PurlieVictorious (1963).

He wrote the script for the comedy and helped write a musical version of the play, Purlie, a satire of antebellum manners and mores. It was filmed and released that same year under the title, Gone are the Days, – a revival of which is slated for next season. Dee and Davis had also previously appeared together on stage in the 1940s in Jeb and Anna Lucasta, appearing together in 11 stage productions and five films, including Do the Right Thing. Davis has also directed and produced movies, including CottonComes to Harlem. Other films include The Cardinal, The Client and I'm Not Rappaport.

Of course, like most prime time specials, the Kennedy Centre tribute missed including important footnotes like the fact that both Davis and Ruby Dee (alongside Harry Belafonte and Lorraine Hansberry) were central members of the Association of Artists for Freedom during the 1950s and ‘60s – which unequivocally supported singer Paul Robeson and scholar W.E.B. DuBois as they were lambasted in both the black and white press for their “communist” views during the Cold War. In fact, Dee and Davis were central members of a Harlem milieu of progressive figures who helped anticipate and contribute to the Black radicalism of the 1960s.

While they were starring in break-through roles on stage and in film, Dee and Davis were also both intimately involved with influential black publications like Freedomways and Liberator. They were often asked by prominent activists in the freedom movement to MC fundraising events, marches and rallies -- notably the March on Washington in 1963. Davis gave important eulogies at the funerals of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., considered himself a black nationalist, and like the two slain Black leaders, a staunch anti-racist. “In a war against all exploiters whomsoever, I am an ally,” he wrote in 1967.

Of his affinities to the freedom movement Davis recently implied it was a natural fit for his experiences, as he had been “profoundly influenced” by singers Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson and poet Langston Hughes – who each expressed Leftist inclinations during the 1930s and ‘40s. "If I had to fear any of the 'isms' that plague us today, it would have to be classism,” he said at a lecture at Cornell University in 1996. “How much suffering will make it necessary to liberate us all?"

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