Ossie Davis.

This article presents a profile of the late actor Ossie Davis and his accomplishments. A warm, avuncular actor with a commanding baritone, Davis, 87, had just begun shooting his 40th film--a comedy called, ironically, Retirement--when he was discovered dead of natural causes Feb. 4 in his Miami Beach hotel room. A crueler irony: Davis's wife of 56 years, actress Ruby Dee, from whom he was usually inseparable, having teamed in projects ranging from Broadway's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) to Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991), was on the other side of world, filming in New Zealand. Close to both King and Malcolm X, Davis was an indefatigable civil rights activist who unleashed his eloquence at countless rallies, including the 1963 March on Washington, which he helped organize. Protest invigorated Davis, who had grown up in a small Georgia town where the Ku Klux Klan threatened his father, an illiterate railway construction worker who encouraged his son's education. It was his partnership with Dee that his admirers remember most fondly. Their devotion to each other was legendary. His own mortality did not seem to concern Davis, despite a recent bout with pneumonia.