On the Mark about Ruby Dee

The Royal Family of theater and the American civil rights movement is dead. Ruby Dee joined

Ruby Dee

her husband of 56 years, Ossie Davis, in the hereafter.

PD critic and former BJ critic Mark Dawidziak does a masterful tribute to actress and Cleveland native Ruby Dee, 91, who died Thursday in her New Rochelle, New York home. Ossie died in 2005.

While born in Cleveland as Ruby Anne Wallace, Ruby moved to Harlem with her dad when she was an infant. But she appeared regularly at Cleveland’s famous Karamu House for productions and Q&A sessions at the country’s oldest integrated theater, where there’s a 40-foot mural of Ruby.

Ruby was married to blues singer Frankie Dee for only a few years in the 1940s, but kept his name throughout her career.

To read Mark’s stirring tribute to Ruby, click on http://www.cleveland.com/tv-blog/index.ssf/2014/06/ruby_dee_kept_giving_to_the_theater_to_social_causes_and_to_cleveland.html#incart_river