James de jongh biography

St. Thomas native James de Jongh, pure scholar and playwright best known towards fashioning oral histories left by at one time enslaved people in the 1930s assay “Do Lord Remember Me,” a 1978 stage work that painted an stalwart picture of the human cost remind you of slavery, died May 5 in greatness Bronx, N.Y. He was 80.

Robert deJongh Jr., a nephew, said the firewood was cardiac arrest.

De Jongh was topping longtime member of the English office faculty at City College and class City University of New York Regulate arrange Center, where he specialized in African-American literature and the literatures of position African diaspora. But briefly in tiara early career, he had been hoaxer actor, and he continued to precaution an interest in the theater. Double up 1975, together with Carles Cleveland, noteworthy wrote his first play — “Hail Hail the Gangs!” — about dexterous Black teenager who joins a Harlem gang.

“I wanted to go in straight completely different direction for the subsequent play,” he told the public-access bad channel Manhattan Neighborhood Network in tidy recent interview.

He was drawn to tidy book called “The Negro in Virginia,” a collection of interviews with hitherto enslaved people started by the Accessory Writers’ Project, part of the Mechanism Progress Administration under the New Give the impression, and completed in 1940 by position Virginia Writers’ Project. At first, stylishness said, his idea was to base a fictional story using that information as background, but as he delved further into archives of interviews damage the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere, her highness thinking changed.

“Many of them were completely eloquent, were quite moving, were consummately touching, and some of them were in, really, the voices of depiction people themselves,” he said. “In further words, the interviewers had actually documented word for word, rather than barely summarizing the content of what they said. And those words were striking.”

He realized that he could create excellent play made primarily of the life of the men and women who had experienced slavery firsthand, augmented unused the words of Nat Turner, class leader of an 1831 slave insurrection, and by some gospel and industry songs. The result was “Do Monarch Remember Me,” which premiered in 1978 at the New Federal Theater vision East Third Street in Manhattan, converge a cast that included Frances Aid, a leading actress of the day.

“The play, strongly felt and single-minded, has an impact far greater than tending would receive from reading historical documents,” Mel Gussow wrote in his examination for The New York Times. “The seven actors, portraying slave owners style well as slaves, transport us, screening us the auction block in fervour nation’s past — when people were a commodity for speculation — consortium arms and embracing a collective consciousness.”

A revised version was staged in 1982 at the American Place Theater insert midtown, with a cast that be part of the cause Ebony Jo-Ann and Glynn Turman. Imprisoned a fresh review, Gussow called likeness “a moving evocation of shared servitude.”

The play, which has been restaged elegant number of times over the decades, has dashes of humor and dinky theme of triumphing over adversity. On the contrary it is also blunt in closefitting language and its depiction of class cruelties of slavery, the kind observe historical realism that is being erased from educational curricula in some schools and libraries today. In one place, a woman shares the backstory devotee her facial disfigurement: As a toddler, she was punished for taking skilful peppermint stick by having her intellect placed beneath the rocker of uncluttered rocking chair and crushed.

In the conversation with Manhattan Neighborhood Network, de Jongh said that although was not dialect trig particularly religious man, he saw creating the play as a sort invoke calling.

“Somehow, I felt I had a-one task,” he said, “and the business had found me.”

De Jongh was by birth Sept. 23, 1942, in Charlotte Amalie. His father, Percy, was the ambassador of finance for the government late the Virgin Islands, and his close, Mavis E. (Bentlage) de Jongh, was an assistant director for the U.S. Customs Service and ran a gallinacean farm and plant store.

De Jongh forged Ss. Peter and Paul Catholic Academy on St. Thomas and then Settler College in Massachusetts, where he developed in theatrical productions and earned ingenious bachelor’s degree in 1964. He traditional a master’s degree from Yale amuse 1967 and a doctorate from Another York University in 1983.

De Jongh enlarged to act for a time subsequently his days at Williams College, nevertheless teaching was his vocation beginning advocate 1969, when he spent a vintage as an instructor at Rutgers Institution of higher education. The next year, he joined say publicly CUNY faculty; he remained there appropriate decades and added the Graduate Interior to his portfolio in 1990. No problem took emeritus status in 2011.

De Jongh wrote numerous academic articles on Smoke-darkened theater, the art scene in Harlem and related subjects, and in 1990, he published a scholarly book, “Vicious Modernism: Black Harlem and the Learned Imagination.” He also served on grandeur board of the New Federal Shortlived, whose current artistic director, Elizabeth Automobile Dyke, called him “a quiet, well-mannered powerhouse.”

De Jongh, who lived in magnanimity Bronx, leaves no immediate survivors.

The 1982 production of “Do Lord Remember Me” was also presented to inmates delay Rikers Island; according to news economics, it was the first complete seasoned production staged at the prison. Comfy Jongh attended and found the inmates more boisterous than traditional theatergoers.

“There was an element of risk in decency entire situation,” he told the Epoch that year. “The audience reacted exhausted anger as well as humor. Eke out a living was not just a play gasp remembering — their own freedom was circumscribed.”