Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball. In the movie about his life, The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), made at the top of his Hall of Fame career with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Ruby Dee portrayed his wife, Rachel. 

She went on to earn an Emmy, a Grammy, and the Screen Actors Guild presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. If that wasn’t enough, Ruby Dee was a Kennedy Center Honors and National Medal of Arts recipient. In 2009 Princeton University awarded Ruby Dee an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree. Her husband was the esteemed actor Ossie Davis, and they often worked together. The couple prized among their close friends Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.