Black History Month: Ruby Dee of Kearny

IoA_Kearny_p62

Photo credit: AT&T Archives.

The Meadowlands Nature Blog is honoring Black History Month with a weekly post. Today the topic is  Ruby Dee — pictured above working in Kearny. This series of four posts originally ran in 2009. That’s great thing about history — it never gets old.

Actress and civil rights champion Ruby Dee, who was born in Cleveland in 1924 and raised in Harlem, workedat the Western Electric Company’s Kearny Works during World War II, soldering wires on an assembly line.

She graduated from Hunter College and got her first Broadway role in a play called “Jeb,” about a black GI war hero. The star was Ossie Davis, whom she married two years later.

Both Davis and Dee were active in the Civil Rights Movement throughout their careers. Dee has been involved with the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Dee starred in “American Gangster,” set in part in Bergen County, in 2007.

For more information on Ruby Dee, click here.

For more information on Kearny’s Western Electric plant, click “Continue reading…” 

Western Electric was one of the nation’s largest distributors of electrical products in the first half of the 20th Century, with plants in Chicago, Baltimore and Kearny.

During World War II, when Ruby Dee worked at the Kearny Works, “most of Western Electric’s products for the Bell System during this period were radio and wire communications equipment for war use at Army and Navy bases and defense contractors across America,” according to a company history.

4 thoughts on “Black History Month: Ruby Dee of Kearny

  1. butterfly decorations

    hello there aand thank you for your info – I have definitely picked up anything new from
    right here. I did however expertise several technical points using this site, as I experienced to reload the web site lots of
    times previou to I could get itt to load correctly.
    I had been wondering if your hosting is OK? Not that I’m complaining,
    but slow loading instanes times will often affect your placement in gogle and could damage yoir hih quality score if ads aand marketing with
    Adwords. Anyway I’m addiing this RSS to my e-mail aand cann look out for a lot more of your
    respective fascinating content. Ensure that you update this again very
    soon.

    Have a look at my web site – butterfly decorations

    Reply
  2. altyazili

    In a frank interview with GQ Magazine, Fox said that she fell in love with a female stripper when she was eighteen and used the experience
    to illustrate her belief that all humans are born with the ability to be attracted to both sexes.

    Seeing that other people can’t see these new effects, colour
    blind folks have begun to ask, ‘can colour
    blind people watch 3D films. When selecting a great movie to watch, you need to consider the audience, as this can help with
    your decision making.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to altyazili Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *