Ossie Davis was born on December 18, 1917, in Cogsdale, Georgia, a town with barely 400 residents. From an early age, he understood the importance of community. Named after his grandfather, Rafford Chapman, he went by “R.C. Davis” until a mishearing led him to adopt the nickname “Ossie.”
His father worked as a railroad repairman—a highly skilled trade considered a “white man’s job” in the Deep South. As Davis’s family moved from town to town for work, they had many encounters with the dangers of Georgia’s sundown towns. The Davises often received death threats and harassment from the Ku Klux Klan that Ossie described as “epic confrontations” solved by “epic Black things.” These early experiences deeply shaped his worldview and artistic approach. His family used storytelling to help their young children navigate racism with empowerment and bravery.
“Mom and Dad knew all the Br’er Rabbit stories,” Davis recalled, “but they also had stories of their own lives and our families… somehow this fascinated me, and I wanted those stories to be written down. And it seemed to me that I was going to school just for that purpose—to learn how to cross the ‘t,’ where to put the comma, and the period—so I could write these stories down. That desire to preserve those stories eventually became an urge to write plays. The urge to communicate at that level—to be a storyteller—remained.”
In the 1930s, Davis hitchhiked from Georgia to Washington, DC to study English and drama at Howard University. But when Professor Alain Locke asked him about his desire to be on stage, Davis realized he hadn’t fully immersed himself in theater. “I was in Washington,” he thought to himself, “and this is Howard University with the Howard Players — I had no idea who the Howard Players were or what they were involved in.” Locke encouraged him to travel to New York, find the Rose McClendon Players, and engage with professional Black theater. “I was so convinced that this was exactly the information that I had come to college to get that I didn’t stay to finish,” he said. “As quickly as I could, I decided that I would go to New York, find this Harlem, find this group, and try to join it.”
In Harlem, Ossie quickly became sought after as an actor, performing across stage and film, and eventually marrying his co-star and muse, Ruby Dee, in 1946. The two were a power couple, not only in theater and film but in their community, becoming heavily entwined with the Civil Rights Movement and befriending leaders like Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that Ossie Davis began experimenting with playwriting. Informed by over a decade of artistry and activism, his plays focused on America’s political landscape in relation to the Black community. He produced his first play, Alice in Wonder, in 1952 with the Elks Community Theater, which was later reworked and renamed The Big Deal for the New Playwrights Theater in 1953. The story featured a Black television actor being subpoenaed for a congressional hearing, a critique of McCarthy-era censorship.
The People of Clarendon County (1955), What Can You Say to Mississippi (1956), and Montgomery Footprints (1956) showcased the larger impacts of civil rights shifts like Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, premiering in community theaters and historical societies across New York City. Davis penned Purlie Victorious: A Non-Confederate Romp Through the Cotton Patch in 1961 in the wake of Emmett Till’s murder and on the precipice of the Freedom Rides. Its levity was a deliberate shift from the more serious dramas of his early writing, offering a mode to resist racism through joy, love, and humor. The play had a successful premiere at Broadway’s Cort Theater (now the James Earl Jones Theatre), with Ossie and Ruby Dee Davis playing the star-crossed lovers. The show ran from September of 1961 to May of 1962, and got Godfrey Cambridge a Tony nomination for portraying Gitlow. In addition to feeling Broadway’s embrace, Davis’s community of activists showed their support, with Malcolm X, MLK Jr., and W.E.B. DuBois traveling to NYC to enjoy the show. Davis recalled DuBois’s coming to see Purlie Victorious’s opening night, saying, “He was 93 years old; still he insisted on climbing the stairs to our dressing room to tell Ruby and me how much he had enjoyed the play.” Former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, raved about the play in her news column My Day, stating, “If you have not seen Purlie Victorious, I think it is well for you as an American citizen to see it and to ponder our racial problem, not as a question affecting our lives here in the United States but as a question affecting our standing and our real sincerity among the peoples of the world.”
In 1970, Davis collaborated with Peter Udell and Gary Geld to adapt the play into a musical (Purlie), which saw even more success. The musical ran from March of 1970 to November of 1971 and took the Tony Awards by storm, garnering wins for Cleavon Little (Purlie) and Melba Moore (Lutiebelle) for best featured person in a musical. For Melba Moore and many young actors in the Purlie ensemble, the play was an electrifying boost into stardom. In the 1970s, Davis turned to film directing, leading features like Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Black Girl (1972), and Gordon’s War (1973). He continued writing, penning autobiographical plays about notable Black artists and intellectuals. His 1976 play, Escape to Freedom, focused on the boyhood of Frederick Douglass and won a Coretta Scott King Award for its writing.
In his later years, Davis returned to acting for film and television, earning an NAACP Image Award for his supporting role in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) and an Emmy Award for Finding Buck McHenry (2000). He and Ruby Dee were inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1994 and received the National Medal of the Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1995. Ossie Davis passed away in February 2005.
Reflecting on his impulse to become a storyteller, Davis said, “I’m not sure that Daddy and Mama sat down and said, ‘We’ve got to give these kids some stories to save them.’ They just enjoyed telling stories. But that is what those stories did to me. They enabled me not only to survive, but to have a little left over.” The same way his parents’ stories inspired him, Ossie Davis’s work — on stage, on screen, and in his community — continues to uplift and inspire generations of storytellers to share the epic stories of their communities with boldness, resilience, and joy.
— Nayanna Simone