James Hatch, Archivist of Black Theater, Dies at 91

A scholar and historian, he amassed an invaluable trove of interviews and other material with his wife, the filmmaker Camille Billops. James V. Hatch, a historian of black theater who, with his wife, the artist and filmmaker Camille Billops, created a vast archive of interviews with black actors, singers, writers and artists, died on Feb. 14 in Manhattan.

He was 91. His son, Dion Hatch, said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease. Professor Hatch, who taught English and theater at City College for three decades, was the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including “The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938” (1990), which he edited with Leo Hamalian, and “Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson” (1993), about the black poet and playwright. His area of scholarship sometimes raised eyebrows because Professor Hatch was white.

“I was born in Iowa, and the only thing I knew about black people was what I read in books — Mark Twain,” he said in an interview for an exhibition called “Still Raising Hell: The Art, Activism, and Archives of Camille Billops and James V. Hatch,” mounted at Emory University in Atlanta in 2016. “I wanted to find out, Who were all the other people that didn’t live in the Baptist church in Oelwein, Iowa? ,” he added.

“I got good cooperation from almost all black people,” he said. “Some of them were jealous — ‘White man, what are you doing writing about our history? ’ ‘I’m trying to learn it. Help me!

’” Certainly the person who helped him the most was Ms. Billops, who was black and whom he met in 1959; they began a romantic relationship and married in 1987. For years their loft, purchased in 1973, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan was a gathering spot for artists, academics and others. “We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators,” Ms.

Billops told Topic Magazine in an interview for an article published just before her death last June. The two began amassing their archive, not only recording interviews with prominent and not-so-prominent black artists and performers, but also accumulating play scripts, handbills, photographs and other materials. They published a number of the oral histories in the journal Artist and Influence; 20 volumes of the journal appeared from 1981 to 2001. Much of the archive is now at Emory; another cache is at City College.