Tribute to Ruby Dee - The Legendary Actress and Civil Rights Activist

Tribute to Ruby Dee - The Legendary Actress and Civil Rights Activist

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Legendary actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee - equally at home on Broadway, TV, film or on a protest march, often alongside Ossie Davis, her husband of 56 years - died Wednesday in her New Rochelle home. She was surrounded by family and friends. Her family, including her daughter Nora Davis Day has confirmed that she was 91.

As mentioned in abcnews, Dee died of natural causes at her New Rochelle, New York. Dee also battled breast cancer a few decades back, is survived by the three children she had with her late husband, actor Ossie Davis: Guy, Nora Day and Hasna Muhammad.

She is always an activist. It is reported in CNN, Dee and Davis - the two, who were married 56 years, always seemed connected - were an odd couple in some ways: She from New York, he from Waycross, Georgia. She was small and stylish, he was big and bluff. But their beliefs were often as one, and they practiced what they preached.

"We shared a great deal in common; we didn't have any distractions as to where we stood in society. We were black activists. We had a common understanding," she told Ebony in 1988.

Dee and Davis met while acting in the 1945 Broadway play "Jeb" in 1945. He proposed three years later with a telegram he sent from Chicago, where he was touring in a play, according to their joint autobiography "With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together," published near their 50th anniversary. The telegram to his girlfriend said he "might as well marry" her. Dee wrote back, "Don't do me any favors."

Their book revealed the challenges of their long marriage, including a phase in the 1960s in which they agreed they could sleep with others when work separated them. The arrangement lasted only a short time, they said. "We ultimately decided that what we had chosen as a possibility didn't really work for us," Davis said in 1999.

"You have to learn how to be married," Dee said. "You have to learn to love somebody."

There was no television in their home for years, The New York Times observed in a 1995 profile, because "television represented an industry that refused to hire black people in significant numbers or in anything other than stereotypical roles."

They appeared at protest rallies and took their children with them. She admitted to a fiery temperament: In a famous "American Gangster" scene, she slaps star Denzel Washington across the face, noting she put everything into the motion.

"It's not far from my nature to whack," she told USA Today. "There's a streak in me."

Dee and Davis were arrested in 1999 while protesting outside New York City police headquarters against the police shooting of an unarmed African immigrant, Amadou Diallo. Dee told reporters the shooting "reminds me of when there were lynchings all over the country."

"We've got to start saying 'No further. This must stop,' " Dee said.