“Nappy Luv” on Valentine’s Day Dee and Davis married in 1948, and as a couple they often staged benefits for civil rights groups and labor unions. In 1957, Davis authored a dramatic rendering of the Montgomery bus boycott, called “Montgomery Footprints.” His 1961 Broadway hit “Purlie Victorious” in which he starred with Dee dealt with racial issues. Dee starred in the Broadway hit, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which won the 1959 Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play. The couple first encountered King in 1956 at Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Davis noted King’s “mellifluous, rolling baritone” and his commanding speaking style, “building one tower of rhetoric after another”. Although they did not share King’s commitment to nonviolence, Davis and Dee enthusiastically embraced King as “a new leader of the black church and community”. The following year, Dee, along with fellow entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., attended the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, organized by Harry Belafonte and others, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Years later at the same site, she and Davis participated in the 1963 March on Washington. @onenappyluv Stanford University The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ #MacFlyFresh #DRCApeParel #NappyLuv #OneNappyLuv #OssieDavis #RubyDee #ossieandruby #Love #Vday #valentines (at 𝑭𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝑰𝒏 𝑳𝒖𝒗) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLSE6KCBmE6/?igshid=1xgio3ddlef1i
