August 27 | 11 Movies
An enduring career for Black entertainers in Hollywood has historically been a limiting experience. Actors like Clarence Muse, Theresa Harris, Lillian Yarbo and Louise Beavers had long careers but rarely received more than a few lines of dialogue in their films, with the exception of Beavers in Imitation of Life (1934). On the opposite end of the spectrum are the careers of Lena Horne, Dorothy Dandridge, Paul Robeson, Hattie McDaniel and Nina Mae McKinney, stars with contracts and breakout roles who never achieved A-list status or longevity in Hollywood due to the era’s racial barriers. Over time, however, a new pool of talent was able to rise to the surface with lasting careers that allowed them to breathe life and dignity into their roles. One of these actors was Ossie Davis. On August 27, TCM is honoring the great actor, writer, director and civil rights activist with a 24-hour salute of programming for the first time as part of our annual Summer Under the Stars showcase.
Hollywood history champions Sidney Poitier for being the first Black man to achieve major Hollywood success: box-office appeal, leading roles and award recognition. But in efforts to count the first, equally talented groundbreakers like Davis are frequently overlooked. Often credited alongside his wife, fellow actor, activist and author Ruby Dee, Davis’s longevity in Hollywood is both remarkable and influential. He worked with some of the greatest stars of his era in an onscreen career that began with 1950s televised plays and uncredited film roles in No Way Out (1950) and The Joe Louis Story (1953), before continuing into the 1960s and ‘70s, in which he directed five films becoming one of the earliest Black directors of the Hollywood system. In the 1980s and ‘90s, Davis emerged as a familiar face in a rewarding collaboration with Spike Lee, while steadily working in film and television into the 2000s. All the while, he served as a leader in the fight for social justice.
But before he reached such great heights of Hollywood stardom and stalwart activism, Ossie Davis was Raiford Chatman Davis, known to his family as “R.C.” The Georgia-born native became “Ossie” when a county clerk misheard his mother’s pronunciation of his name while filling out his birth certificate. Davis studied drama in his youth before taking a break to serve in the U.S. Army during World War II. He returned to the arts after the war and secured roles on Broadway, starring in “Anna Lucasta” and “Jeb” with hopes of saving enough money to attend Columbia University to study playwriting. During this time, he met Dee, who would become his wife and creative partner for nearly 60 until Davis died in 2005.
Together, Dee and Davis broke into Hollywood alongside Poitier in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s No Way Out, marking Davis’s uncredited feature debut. Though cinema had begun exploring race in a group of post-War 1949 films (Pinky, Lost Boundaries, Home of the Brave and Intruder in the Dust), Davis and Dee were shocked by the lack of diversity they encountered behind the scenes. Donald Bogle recalled an anecdote from Dee in his book “Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood.” “We were immediately struck by the fact that we didn’t see any Black people working anywhere despite the unions that existed within the Hollywood system. No technicians, no grips, no electricians, no props people… From the minute we entered the gate in the morning till the time we left, we were in an all-white world.”
Nevertheless, both actors persevered, and Davis earned a small, uncredited part in The Joe Louis Story. Davis later told Harold Dow in an interview with Emmy Television that he contributed $3,000 to get The Joe Louis Story out of lab development at Dee’s request. Meanwhile, he continued making a name for himself on television in starring roles as the lead in The Emperor Jones (1955), an adaptation of a Eugene O’Neill play that actor Paul Robeson immortalized on film in 1933. Throughout the latter 1950s, finding quality roles and opportunities to play more than service workers proved difficult for Davis. But by 1961, he wrote the three-act satire “Purlie Victorious,” which he starred in alongside Dee, comedian and actor Godfrey Cambridge and Alan Alda. Under the direction of Howard da Silva, the play premiered on Broadway and ran for 261 performances. A revival took place in 2023-2024 with Leslie Odom Jr. in the starring role. The success of “Purlie Victorious” led to a film adaptation, Gone Are the Days! (1963), granting Davis one of the first Hollywood screenplay credits for an African American alongside such contemporaries as Lorraine Hansberry.
Throughout the early 1960s, Davis worked tirelessly for civil rights alongside leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Davis helped organize the 1963 March on Washington with Dee, serving as master and mistress of ceremonies. After the murder of Malcolm X in 1965, Davis delivered the eulogy at his funeral. (Spike Lee would later reenact this speech for his film Malcolm X, 1992.) Shortly after, Davis starred alongside fellow activist Sammy Davis Jr. in the independently produced drama A Man Called Adam (1966). Directed by Leo Penn, the heartbreakingly true-to-life film follows jazz musician Adam Johnson (Davis Jr.), whose battles with racism and trauma drive him to alcoholism and reactionary behavior, threatening his career and his budding romance with Claudia (Cicely Tyson in her feature film debut in a credited role), a civil rights worker and the granddaughter of Adam’s bandmate Willie (Louis Armstrong). Davis plays Nelson, Adam’s best friend who tries to keep his friend in line.
In 1968, Davis starred alongside Burt Lancaster in the Sydney Pollack Western The Scalphunters. Davis plays Joseph Lee, a free, educated house slave who is the hostage of the indigenous Kiowa people. They trade him for furs that they take from fur trapper Joe Bass (Burt Lancaster). Together, Lee and Bass become reluctant allies and rivals as Bass forces Lee to traverse the West with him to get his furs back, encountering dangerous bounty hunters along the way. Telly Savalas stars as the head of the bounty men and Shelley Winters as his mistress. The role of Lee was unique to portrayals of Black men in the 1960s as Poitier had all but dominated the screen with roles often characterized by their idealistic, sanitized nature in a desire to correct the negative portrayals that propagated films before. Davis told Roger Ebert in 1968 that in Lee, he saw an opportunity to play a man who wasn’t a hero but simply a three-dimensional character struggling to survive.
Two days after The Scalphunters was released, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Davis delivered the eulogy at the funeral for his friend and mentor. The following year, Davis starred in the Western Sam Whiskey (1969) alongside Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson. Lee plays a blacksmith recruited on an adventure to recover stolen gold bars. In 1970, Davis directed Cotton Comes to Harlem, the success of which indirectly led to the era of Blaxploitation as white-owned studios rushed to produce all-Black movies aimed at urban Black audiences for guaranteed profits. Throughout the 1970s, Davis continued to direct and appear in television and film, including in the made-for-TV-movie The Sherriff (1971); Let’s Do It Again (1975), directed by Poitier and starring Poitier and Bill Cosby; and Hot Stuff (1979), which marked the first of only two films directed by Dom DeLuise.
In the 1980s, Davis continued acting, including in the Paul Newman-directed family drama Harry & Son (1984), but it was his work with Spike Lee that gained him renewed awareness, starting with School Daze (1988). Lee, a longtime admirer of Davis and Dee, wrote the two veteran actors expressing his desire to work with them when he was still an NYU film student. Davis kept the letter for years. Do the Right Thing (1989) was Davis and Lee’s second collaboration and follows 24 hours in a Brooklyn neighborhood as racial tensions run high during a heatwave that leads to an explosive, violent ending. Davis plays Da Mayor, the neighborhood drunk who dispenses wise words to a neighborhood that doesn’t care to listen, while he also tries to court Mother Sister (Dee), the neighborhood stoop lady.
Lee and Davis reunited again for five more films, including Get on the Bus (1996). The road movie drama premiered a year after the Million Man March in Washington D.C. and is set during the lead-up to the 1995 event where hundreds of thousands of Black men gathered on the National Mall in solidarity and in protest of social injustices. Davis is featured among an ensemble group of men on a bus ride from L.A. to D.C. to attend the march. Along the way, they engage in deep discourse about the Black experience and several social and political topics.
At 86 years old, Davis appeared alongside Mario Van Peebles in Baadasssss! (2003) showing in its TCM premiere. Directed and co-written by Peebles, the fictionalized, biographical film is told through Peebles’ eyes documenting how his father, pioneering director Melvin Van Peebles, made and distributed his revolutionary, controversial film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), which signaled the beginning of a new era in cinema. Davis plays Granddad. Davis made his last film with Lee in 2004 and appeared as a recurring cast member in the series “The L Word,” his final project before he passed away in 2005, leaving a legacy that blended art and activism for more than six decades and inspired the generation of his time and beyond.
