James Hatch

For more than fifty years, James Vernon Hatch (1928-2020) was a leading authority of African American theater, and along with his wife and creative partner Camille Billops (1933-2019), became a proponent for archiving the history of African Americans in the literary and visual arts, dance, and film. As co-founder of the Hatch/Billops Collection in New York, located on the corner of Broadway and Broome Streets, the duo amassed a collection of clippings files, playbills, photographs, books, art catalogs, periodicals, and more than one thousand African American authored playscripts. The archive became a mecca for the intellectually curious, artistic, and gifted. In a word, the Hatch/Billops Collection is simply breathtaking.

Hatch found his voice through the arts as a “way of seeing” beauty and purpose in a world filled with chaos. He believed that artists had to “know more than the audience” and maintain a “freedom of expression” in order to have an impact on the communities of which they are a part. These principles among others, Hatch felt, were necessary for artists to use as a form of protest to represent or reveal some sense of reality or teach about being human in the complex world in which we all live.