Actress and Activists Win Foundation Award

The acclaimed actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee has received a Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award, garnered a place in the NAACP Image Award Hall of Fame, and won a Grammy.

And now Dee can add another accolade to her mantle after she received the 2007 Harvard Foundation Humanitarian Award last night in Appleton Chapel.

Calling Dee a “brilliant American,” S. Allen Counter—the director of the Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations—praised this year’s recipient.

“For over a half century, she has given masterful stage and screen performances that have awed and inspired Americans of all backgrounds,” Counter said.

Dee, who starred opposite Sidney Poitier in the 1961 film, “A Raisin in the Sun,” has been known throughout her acting career for portraying characters on stage and screen that countered racial stereotypes.

Along with her late-husband Ossie Davis, Dee is known for her work in civil rights.

After accepting the award, Dee delivered the annual Peter J. Gomes Humanitarian Lecture.

“Something comes to mind as I stand here. I’m thinking of myself in elementary school,” she said, recounting a music teacher who used to look down from her piano and smile in a show of praise.

“I think about God going about his business and just now he looked down on me and smiled,” she added.

The performer held the audience in rapt attention as she wove together anecdotes from her life and selections from her writings and others’.

“This day makes me feel like I am somebody,” she said, using the line both as an expression of her gratitude and as a starting point for one of her original poems.

Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, one of the founders of the Foundation, said that it was a “wonderful thing,” particularly for students, to be able to be in the presence of a “legend.”

Dee’s significance was not lost on students in attendance.

Andrew C. Coles ’09 said after the event that he was “blown away” by Dee.

“She’s a very powerful and moving speaker. You could see it in her face and her eyes,” he said.

“It was worth coming out,” he added.

The Harvard Foundation Humanitarian award was inaugurated in 1984 as a way to recognize those individuals who commit themselves to improving humanity and advancing human rights.

The first recipient was Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr.

He was followed by Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.