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 OSSIE
DAVIS
RENAISSANCE MAN OF THE PEOPLE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, Feb. 13-19, 2005
It is hard to accept that Ossie Davis has made his transition.
He was scheduled to come to Detroit in May to receive an
award from the Center for Peace and Conflict
Studies and to be guest of honor at the premiere of Professional
Revolutionary: The Life of Saul Wellman, a documentary about
the legendary political activist and survivor of the Spanish
Civil War, World War II and McCarthyism.
We were also going to celebrate my 90th birthday with a
conversation at the Boggs Center.
I was so looking forward to that conversation.
Like millions of others, I honor Ossie Davis for his gifts
and achievements: his majestic voice and imposing presence,
his plays and performances, his (and Ruby1s) blazing the
trail for generations of black artists and actors, his (and
Ruby1s) courage and skill in integrating their citizenship/political/Movement
lives with their professional lives.
But I especially cherished Ossie as a black man who, like
my late husband Jimmy Boggs, had been born and raised in
the Jim Crow South in the early 20th Century, had been part
of the Progressive movement after World War II, had refused
to be intimidated by the McCarthyism and anti-Communism
of the 1950s, had marched with Martin and also described
Malcolm as 3our black shining Prince2 in the 1960s, and
was helping to build the new movement we now need as we
enter the 21st century.
Despite the demands on him as an actor and speaker, Ossie
always made time to do benefit performances for Detroit
Summer and to sit down with young people who wanted to know
how he and Ruby had been able to stay married for so long
and/or how they had been able to make their livings as artists
and actors without selling out.
Among the questions I wanted to explore with him:
* What have blacks and the country lost because of the integration
that was achieved by the civil rights struggles? How does
one deal with the new contradictions that arise from successful
struggles?
* Why was it so important for blacks and the country that
blacks refused to be intimidated by McCarthyism?
* What did he learn from growing up in the rural South that
might help young blacks raised in urban ghettoes?
* Why did Jimmy think that 3 being locked in racism was
the most devastating thing that had ever happened to us?
At Jimmy’s Memorial celebration in 1993 Ossie described
how he had often been born again through encounters with
Jimmy. This is how he summed up their last meeting.
Jimmy was ill and couldn1t come to the program. But when
I got to the house, he immediately embraced me with one
hand and with the other gave me three pages on which were
the questions, which had to be resolved to make this an
intelligent and decent society. So Jimmy gave me my assignment,
and reading the questions and his thoughts and propositions
about them, once again I was born again. Because I came
across the concept that Racism as we had used it in our
struggle was no longer valid. Racism was indeed a very small
designation of what the problems were. What we needed to
do was enlarge our frame of reference. Our struggle indeed
could only be meaningful if it was a struggle in which everybody
was fought for instead of fought over; nobody was any greater
or any less than anyone else. The struggle in its purest
sense had to be focused on elevating the lives of all the
people.
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