Ruby Dee

Ruby Ann Wallace was born on the twenty-seventh of October 1922 in Cleveland, Ohio, the third of four children of Marshall Edward Nathaniel Wallace — a cook, waiter, and railroad porter — and Gladys Hightower Wallace. While she was still a small child the family moved to Harlem, and it was in that vibrant crucible of Black art and letters that she was raised and came of age, taking the stage name Ruby Dee.

She trained at Hunter College and with the American Negro Theatre, and across an eight-decade career she became one of the defining artists of the American stage and screen. She originated the role of Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and reprised it on film. In 1965, at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, she made history as the first Black actress to play leading Shakespearean roles there, appearing as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew and Cordelia in King Lear.

Her artistry was matched by her conscience. With her husband and lifelong partner, the actor and writer Ossie Davis, she stood at the center of the civil-rights movement, lending her voice to the March on Washington and to the causes of Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. A poet and author as well as a performer, she won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Obie, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, received the National Medal of Arts and Kennedy Center Honors, and earned an Academy Award nomination for American Gangster (2007).

Ruby Dee died on the eleventh of June 2014 at her home in New Rochelle, New York, at the age of ninety-one. May her grace, her courage, and her voice be honored for as long as stories are told.