CCNY Libraries News & Events

Launching the Digitized Hatch-Billops Oral History Collection

By Adriene Lara

The Hatch-Billops Oral History collection bundles over 200 oral history interviews, lectures, and panel discussions on Black American cultural history, mainly conducted between 1970 and 1974 with artists, actors, playwrights, musicians, and scholars across the United States. The collection began in the 1960s under the lead of historian and former City College (CCNY) professor James V. Hatch and archivist and artist Camille Billops. Both of whom have since passed in the summers of 2020 and 2019 respectively, and the collection now also serves as a robust memory of their legacy. Various sites house different iterations of the collection: the CCNY Libraries Archives, Emory University Library, New York Public Library, and now, a digital version on Artstor. 

I first took a supporting role in the collection's digitization last fall, being one of my first projects as Project Coordinator of Digital Scholarship Services (DSS) at the CCNY Libraries. At DSS, we support faculty and staff with digital academic work across campus, from setting up online repositories for archival materials to designing digital exhibits of academic research. At first, I only worked with the technical side of the collection. I handled project website settings and audio files. But when I began listening to the recordings themselves, I became drawn to the stories and knowledge I heard in them.

Under the guidance of Music Librarian Michael Crowley and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ching-Jung Chen, and with the support of Digital Projects Manager Vivian Chan, I began cataloging the digitized recordings myself. I mainly filled in basic information on each record, like names of interviewees and dates of recording.

Over the few months I worked with the collection, I got to listen to one interview from beginning to end, which was with Louise Lewis, who worked as the Special Collections Librarian for the Trevor Arnett Library at what was formerly Atlanta University. Lewis takes the interviewer, name unconfirmed, through their catalog, and offers an overview of each collection. I began to draw connections between their archives and the Hatch-Billops Collection that I was cataloging. Lewis mentions the Countee Cullen and Harold Jackman Memorial Committees, whose collections became major cornerstones in the Trevor Arnett Library and, separately, members of whom have interviews stored in the Hatch-Billops tapes. Many of the items Lewis speaks about in their archives as a whole contain personal letters and mementos from different people, including playwright and educator Owen Dodson, who James Hatch interviewed for the Hatch-Billops collection in 1971.

This was my first time hearing these kinds of personal histories about people whose work, lives, and relationships have been so formative to Black cultural movements in the United States and beyond. I began to think about my own relationships to these stories, both of race and anti-Blackness in the U.S., and of resistance and movements toward liberation. Many of the people whose stories are kept

in this collection are also still alive—this reminds me how close, tangible, and ongoing all of these histories are today.

From there, I began to consider all of the relationships that formed those stories. Whenever I sat down to fill out my metadata spreadsheet, I often found myself resisting more research. I came across information I could only confirm from the box that the tape came in, like the name of a former Arts Magazine editor who was on a New York Cultural Center panel on Black artists and White critics. I heard offhand mentions of events, like a reading by poet Sonia Sanchez at City College in 1971 that I only found information about in an excerpt from one article by D. H. Melhem. And often, I learned about moments and projects I did not find any record of in my online searches, like an effort in 1972 and 1973 to organize a tape library of Third World artists at CCNY.

At one point in the interview with Louise Lewis, she mentions sociologist W. E. B Du Bois, who taught at Atlanta University but decided not to leave his papers with their Archives due to a strained relationship with the institution. Lewis notes, "When the person leaves, a bulk of the history goes with them." Archives like the Hatch-Billops Collection have become part of creating a history that stays.

This exciting project was made possible by a 2019 grant from the GRAMMY Museum Grant Program won by the CCNY Music Library. The digitized audio collection, CCNY Hatch-Billops Oral History Interviews, is available for open listening on Artstor.org for any CUNY-affiliated Artstor users. For users beyond CUNY, select access is available on request. See the CCNY Hatch-Billops research guide here. 

Image 1: James V. Hatch and Camille Billops on the UCLA campus, 1960. Credit: Camille Billops and James V. Hatch Archives at Emory University. https://libraries.emory.edu/exhibits/still-raising-hell-billops-hatch.html
Image 2: Hatch-Billops Collection on Artstor. Thumbnail from Oral History Interview with Camille Billops by James Hatch.
Image 3: James V. Hatch and Camille Billops. http://news.emory.edu/stories/2014/09/er_billops_hatch_film_festival/campus.html