Ossie Davis

Ossie Davis (December 18, 1917 – February 4, 2005) was an African American film actor, director, poet, playwright, writer, and social activist.

During World War II, Davis spent four years in the Army, mainly as a surgical technician in an African American unit of a military hospital in Liberia, where he tended wounded soldiers and local inhabitants. He served in the Army Medical Corps in Liberia for nearly three years, helping to establish a hospital there for African American soldiers -- the Army, of course, was still segregated. There he penned and performed a few shows for the troops.

Ossie Davis: an appreciation

• Ossie Davis, National Visionary
• NPR audio archive
• The Career of Ossie Davis - New York Times Slide Show

Links

• Ossie Davis & Ruby Dee: The Official Site
• Ossie Davis (1917-2005) at the New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Ossie Davis (1917-2005) on Wikipedia
• The Campaign for the Ossie Davis Endowment
• Black servicemen and servicewomen in World War II
• Tribute to Ossie Davis
• Ossie Davis
• Men in Movies: Ossie Davis
• [https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/LTC4-7TY
• [https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10425975/ossie-davis
• [https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Davis-81194

Side notes

In February, New Orleans' D-Day Museum – in cooperation with Tulane's
Amistad Research Center and The Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans – hosted a first-ever national symposium on the African American experience in World War II. Black vets celebrated their place in history, but also traded with historians' stories of discrimination, protest and reprisal. Even keynote speaker Ossie Davis revealed a deadly racial incident he witnessed while stationed in Liberia. The symposium title, "Double Victory: Fighting on Two Fronts" alludes to a grassroots civil rights movement that called for "Victory at Home, Victory Abroad." The movement had no leaders, but some of its adherents were so passionate that they burned or carved a "double V" on their chests.

"Troublemakers" in the controversial 364th Regiment had those "double Vs," according to Army intelligence files.

Actor, Playwright, Film Director, and Social Reformer. Born Raiford Chatman Davis, his father was a railway construction engineer. The name "Ossie" came from a county courthouse clerk who misheard his mother's pronunciation of his initials "R.C." when he was born. He attended Howard University in Washington, DC but dropped out in 1939 to fulfill his acting career in New York. His acting career, which spanned seven decades, began in 1939 with the Rose McClendon Players in Harlem, with his first stage debut in "Joy Exceeding Glory" (1939). From 1940 to 1995 he would appear in nearly 30 other stage productions, including "Booker T. Washington" (1940), "No Time for Sergeants" (1956, replacement for Earle Hyman), and "A Raisin in the Sun" (1959, replacement for Sidney Poitier), and "Purlie Victorious" (1961, which he wrote). In 1948 he married actress Ruby Dee. They were well known as civil rights activists, and were close personal friends of Malcolm X, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other icons of the era. They were instrumental in organizing the 1963 civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He, along with Ahmed Osman, delivered the eulogy at the funeral of Malcolm X and also delivered a stirring tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, at a memorial in New York's Central Park the day after King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968. In 1950 he made his film debut in the Sidney Poitier film "No Way Out" and went on to appear in over 40 other films, including "The Scalphunters" (1963, with Burt Lancaster), "The Hill" (1965, with Sean Connery), "Sam Whiskey" (1969, with Burt Reynolds), "Slaves" (1969, with Dionne Warwick), "Gladiator" (1992, with Cuba Gooding, Jr.), "Malcolm X" (1992, with Denzel Washington), and "12 Angry Men" (1997, with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott). He also found recognition late in his life by working in several of director Spike Lee's films, including "Do The Right Thing" (1989), "Jungle Fever" (1991), "Get on the Bus" (1996), and "She Hate Me" (2004). He made numerous appearances on television, most memorably "King" (1978 miniseries), "Roots: The Next Generations" (1979), "Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy "Satchel" Paige" (1981), "Alex Haley's Queen" (1992), and "The Ghost of Christmas Eve" (1999). His credits as a film director include "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1970), "Black Girl" (1972), "Gordon's War" (1973), "Kongi's Harvest" (1973), and "Countdown at Kusini" (1976). He was the voice of 'Anansi' the spider on the PBS children's television series "Sesame Street" in its animation segments. His last film role was a several episode guest roles on the Showtime drama series "The L Word," as a father struggling with the acceptance of his daughter 'Bette' (played by actress Jennifer Beals) parenting a child with her lesbian partner. In 1989 he and his wife were named to the NAACP Image Awards Hall of Fame and in 1995, they were awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation's highest honor conferred to an individual artist on behalf of the US. In 2004 they were recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors. He was found dead in a Miami, Florida hotel room at the age of 87. An official cause of death was not released, but he was known to have suffered from heart problems.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/archives/2001/0410/covs.html