Whenever Professor James de Jongh summoned me to his office, it usually meant he just wanted to be in touch. No reprimand, and nothing more than a chat from the director of our Black Studies Program at the City College of New York. A few minutes would pass before he would break out of his reflective, thoughtful mode and begin discussing the nature of his request.
This was a common demeanor of de Jongh, and other students and colleagues shared a similar opinion about him. As one of them said, “He seemed to be mulling over the disposition of one of the characters in his play.” Some of these moments returned to me upon learning of his passing on May 5, 2023, in the Bronx. He was 80.
Several years have gone by since I last saw him. I had the impression that he had just quietly taken his leave of the university, devoting the remaining days of his life to creative endeavors, perhaps now with time to finish a number of literary projects and complete another play.
One obituary mentioned his best-known play, “Do Lord Remember Me” (1978). This came as a surprise since I had no idea he was a playwright. Many of our few moments together were given to faculty matters and course material in the syllabus. He rarely offered anything personal, keeping rigidly to the purpose of the meeting.
I sought and found a version of the play, and found that the program at the beginning explains the play: “The memories of ex-slaves recorded in interviews in the 1930s constitute the raw material of this theater piece. The lines and dialogue of this play are the words of Black men and women in their 80s and 90s as they recall their experience of the ‘peculiar institution’ [as it affected them] nearly a lifetime ago. The author has taken these verbatim texts and structured them. Some characters have merged for stage economy, but their words and their meanings have not been altered. This play is a projection into the past through the medium of the words of these ex-slaves, now dead for more than a generation. It is an exploration of collective memory because some things should never be forgotten.”
Whether in his plays or lectures, De Jongh was dedicated to making sure his students and audiences understood his mission, preventing the erasure of the past no matter how bitter and painful.
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De Jongh was born on September 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie on the island of St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands. Percy, his father, was the commissioner of finance for the government of the Virgin Islands, and his mother, Mavis E. (Bentiage), was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and owned a poultry farm and plant store.
He attended Saints Peter & Paul Catholic School in St. Thomas and then Williams College (Williamstown, Mass.), where he appeared in theatrical productions and earned a B.A. in 1964. Three years later, he received a master’s degree from Yale and later a Ph.D. from New York University in 1983. His teaching career began at Williams and continued at Rutgers University. In 1970, he joined the faculty at CUNY. By 1990, he had added the Graduate Center to his résumé. He reached emeritus status in 2011.
Along with his teaching and plays, de Jongh wrote numerous academic articles about Black theater, the arts in Harlem, and related subjects. In 1990, he published Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Literary Imagination. This excerpt summarizes his perspective on some of the issues at the advent of the Harlem Renaissance:
“The presence of this vanguard in Harlem, and its spectacular debut before the arbiters of American culture at a pair of superbly stage-managed dinners, were in large part the successful outcome of a deliberate policy pursued by a handful of Harlem’s cultural ‘midwives.’ Langston Hughes cites three. Jessie Fauset, as literary editor of Crisis, discovered and first published several of the major voices of the Renaissance, including Langston Hughes himself. Charles Johnson kept dossiers on talented young African-Americans, tempted them to come to Harlem, and manipulated their career moves thereafter from behind the scenes. Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar, acted as ‘chamberlain’ in the Park Avenue court of Charlotte Osgood Mason, the fabled ‘godmother’ and patron to young Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. To these, David Levering Lewis adds three others. Walter White, the first black novelist since Paul Laurence Dunbar, exploited his celebrity to make his apartment at 90 Edgecombe Avenue ‘a stock exchange for cultural commodities.’ Caspar Holstein, the numbers banker, financed many of the awards and prizes. James Weldon Johnson, executive secretary of the NAACP, endorsed and supported Fauset and White’s cultural program, sometimes over the objections of Du Bois.”
An 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was presented to inmates at Rikers Island—according to news accounts, the first complete professional production staged at the prison. De Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers. “There was an element of risk in the entire situation,” he told the New York Times that year. “The audience reacted with anger as well as humor. It was not just a play about remembering—their own freedom was circumscribed.”
When asked about his plays and creative process, he told an interviewer from the Manhattan Neighborhood Network that the plays were a particular calling: “Somehow, I felt I had a task, and the task had found me.” And what a finding.