A farewell to Ossie Davis.

I peered over the shoulder of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane and noticed the devastating headline: "Ossie Davis, Actor, Writer, and Eloquent Champion of Racial Justice, Dead at 87." As the plane landed, I felt sick to my stomach.

Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee were a part of my political family. Those two indefatigable warriors had fought side by side in most battles for racial and social justice from the 1940s into the twenty-first century. And miraculously they seemed to have suffered no lasting battle scars, no physical or emotional wounds that marked them as having been on the front lines. There was hope for the rest of us. We could fight for justice, win some and lose some, suffer a few frontal assaults, and still emerge intact, sane, and looking good.

I last saw Ossie Davis two years before he died, and even then he was still a proud, handsome man--over six feet and still standing tall. Instead of beating him down, age had wrapped her arms around him ever so gracefully. He and Ruby were the living reminder that the past was not so far away, and that aging was nothing to fear.

In the spring of 2003, the Chicago Public Library adopted A Raisin in the Sun for its "One Book, One Chicago" project. For the culminating citywide event, the library invited Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis to come to town to be interviewed about their lives and their performances in the Broadway production of the play. I was asked to interview them on stage. I didn't even look at my calendar. I said yes. I was thrilled.

When the evening finally arrived for the interview, I met Ossie and Ruby backstage. They immediately insisted on dispensing with the Mr. Davis and Ms. Dee, as I think they did with just about everyone, and we spent some time chatting and comparing notes about friends and comrades we had in common. But they seemed tired. They'd had a full schedule: a meeting with the mayor, a tour of the city, and an event with school children. It was dinnertime, and they still had not eaten a proper meal. Maybe this is not going to work, I thought to myself. Maybe they are not going to be energetic or engaged enough to meet the expectations of the 400-person audience that was waiting anxiously in their seats out front.

But what I realized once we were onstage was that they were still consummate entertainers. The stage was their second home. And when the curtain went up and the lights flipped on, they kept the audience rapt and delighted for nearly two hours.

As we settled into our living room-like interview set, I asked them about their childhoods. Quickly, I forgot about the audience. It was them and me. Story after story unfolded, and I was enthralled by Ruby's quick commanding voice, alternating with Ossie's slow baritone. I knew the parameters of their lives, and I had read their joint autobiography, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, but nothing prepared me for their magnetic onstage presence and the casual chronology of history they offered by simply recalling their lives.

Ossie had been the quiet unassuming boy, and Ruby had been a tough little street fighter beginning in grade school. He had fought in World War II while Ruby pioneered new roles for black artists in the then-segregated and often denigrating American theater. Ossie and Ruby had known all the giants of the struggle spanning some five decades: Paul and Essie Robeson, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. He and Ruby were masters of ceremonies at the historic March on Washington in 1963, and Davis eulogized Malcolm X at his memorial in 1965. Opponents of the Vietnam War, they remained active in the decades that followed, demonstrating against apartheid in the 1980s and combating AIDS in the '90s.

To the very end, Ossie Davis's name was on ads to end the war in Iraq and on petitions to defend affirmative action. His name and Ruby Dee's were in the history books I studied, and on the roster of the organizations I joined. Their names were on fundraising letters for nearly every cause I have contributed my measly $50 donations to. His name was on other lists as well. He was blacklisted during the McCarthy years, as were many politically progressive and left-leaning black artists. Davis was labeled a subversive because of his support for socialist ideals and his friendships with members of the Communist Party, as well as the fact that he himself was briefly a member of the Young Communist League, a fact for which he made no apologies.

If any single metaphor captures who and what Davis and Dee together signified for African Americans and for the progressive movement, it is the metaphor of a bridge. Their careers connected pioneer playwright Lorraine Hansberry to Spike Lee, who cast the couple in several of his films.

Ossie Davis was above all an artist. But as he once put it, even though he knew early on that his life would "center on words and stories," he "couldn't become an artist until I first became a man." He studied politics and philosophy, read poetry, and defined a set of beliefs that would guide him the rest of his life. He was an artist of a different mold, one who turned down lucrative jobs that threatened to compromise his integrity, and eagerly accepted low-paying ones that offered an outlet for his passion and his principles.

He helped stage a play about the 1955 racist murder of Emmett Till called What Can You Say to Mississippi? and worked on an award-winning teleplay about the life of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers.

Davis later collaborated with jazz legends Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr., and over the course of his career he worked with some of the biggest names in film and theater. In 1995, Dee and Davis received the National Medal of the Arts at the White House. There, they joked with one another that they wouldn't be surprised if they were snatched out of the procession and carted off by the FBI at any moment. The two were also honored by the NAACP, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Theatre Hall of Fame.

Onstage that night in Chicago, they were so familiar with one another I almost expected one to finish the other's sentence, but no. It wasn't like that. They were friends, collaborators, comrades, and lovers for fifty-four years, but they were not connected at the hip. I realized quickly that these were two fiercely independent people with three stories to tell: hers, his, and theirs.

One example of that independence was the fact that many years prior they had enjoyed an open marriage as a way to accommodate demanding schedules and to satisfy unfed appetites. Still, over the half century of their relationship, there had been more unity than difference and more years together than apart.

Through the trials and travails of life, Ossie Davis was triumphant. As a black boy born in the Jim Crow South, he made the dangerous and deliberate journey to manhood, but never bowed and never bent.

In the face of the ugliness of racism, the bloody brutality of war, and the stubbornness of economic injustice, Ossie 'Davis stood up in opposition, but still embraced the beauty of optimism in a way only an artist can.

Ossie Davis's spirit of resistance and his hunger for justice leave a political and artistic legacy that is unmatched--except perhaps by that of his dear Ruby.

Illustration by Rachel Salomon

Barbara Ransby is an associate professor in the departments of African American Studies and History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of the award-winning biography "Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision."