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.