A horseshoe, a hairbrush, a fountain pen, - in any other context they'd be trinkets, but at the home of J. Willie Lewis Jr., they are history.

Crowded into his living room, lining the walls of his hall and tucked in a storage shed outside, Mr. Lewis, 60, of Augusta, has devoted plenty of space and nearly 30 years of his life to gathering and displaying items that tell the story of black Americans.

There are pictures of local pioneers and national heroes, close to 100 2-inch binders filled with biographies and newspaper clippings of history makers and historic landmarks.

There are limited-edition prints and special-edition magazines all detailing some part of the black experience.

"It's to show the kids," Mr. Lewis said, obviously proud of the work he began in the mid-1960s. "I see them getting their heritage, their history, out of it."

He's not hesitant to share it, either.

Mr. Lewis has made it a mission to be a one-man black history expert.

He speaks at his church, serves as a lay historian by helping students and their parents find answers and conduct research on black Americans, and continually searches for pieces to the puzzle that he considers black history to be.

"It's like they busted up a rock and threw it all over the world and we can never get it back together," he said. "We've been searching for that. We're still looking for our sisters and brothers."

Compiling history

THE COMPLETE STORY OF BLACK AMERICA IS A COMPLEX TOPIC.

ALONG WITH THE DIFFICULTY OF RESEARCHING AND DOCUMENTING BLACK AMERICANS DURING THE TIME OF enslavement, and a slow realization of the significant history among black Americans, there also has been the problem of getting those who hold historic items and knowledge to realize the wealth of information they possess.

"One of the first challenges we face is allowing individuals in the community to die, to pass away, without sitting down with them with a voice recorder, or a pen and pad or video recorder and getting their history on paper for future generations," said Corey Rogers, the historian at Augusta's Lucy Craft Laney Museum of Black History, which documents local black history.

Getting the tales, and the documents and/or historically significant artifacts, from those primary sources could go a long way toward preserving black history both locally and nationally, Mr. Rogers said.

"A lot of families, when they think it's time to do some major cleaning for spring, will discard things that are historically significant, like diplomas and funeral notices," he said. "All that information is valuable, especially when you think about what is included on funeral notices. Sometimes you have relatives going back three or four generations in one place. Still, people throw away that quote-unquote 'junk' when what we, as historians, really want is for them to give it to us and let us decide if it is junk."

There's also the problem of access when it comes to preserving and showcasing black history.

Mr. Lewis said he's found in his years of gathering information that it is rarely in one place, and one lead likely will take hours or days of research, for which backup information is needed.

"It's there, but it's buried," he said.

Though that is true of any history, Mr. Rogers said, it beckons to a larger problem of the fragmentation of black history in particular, said Marcellus Barksdale, the director of the Department of African-American Studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta.

"We have a lot of museums and libraries, there's the Schomburg (Center for Research in Black Culture) in New York - I can't imagine anyone doing research on black history and not going there - and here in Atlanta we have one, but it needs to be centralized," Dr. Barksdale said. "We do need to recognize our heroes and the icons of our struggle, but rather than have a whole lot of small (museums and libraries) and many having difficulty staying afloat, maybe one or two regional ones would be used more."

That step has been in the works for more than 20 years, with proposals of a national black history museum going around Congress. In Dec. 2003, President Bush signed legislation establishing the museum as part of the Smithsonian Institute. On Jan. 30, a site at the National Mall was announced for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

The proposed $500 million, 350,000-square-foot museum is expected to be finished within a decade, and is the right direction toward preserving black history, Dr. Barksdale said.

"This undergirds and shores up what we do as professors," he said. "We can point to that and have students go. But more, to have an institution which addresses the historical roots and foundations of any people seems to give them strength and support. It gives them grounding, it's important to them, it makes them important. It gives us a sense of place and importance in the country and the world."

Black history 365

Providing a sense of importance for black history was one of the reasons Dr. Carter G. Woodson championed having a black history week when he proposed it in 1926. Though that week has turned into a monthlong celebration, many, including actor Morgan Freeman, have started to question whether having a time designated to the study and the celebration of black accomplishments should be all there is.

"Do we still have it relegated in our mind that black history is just February? Yes," Mr. Rogers said. "There are those who turn on the lights on Feb. 1 and turn them off on Feb. 28. But then there are those who talk about Black History 365."

Mr. Lewis, who considers himself in the latter group, sees it, too.

"Some places they call me and I say, 'Call me after February,' even though I'm free. That's to keep it going. It's kind of like Morgan Freeman said, if we can get away from that 28 days to 365, we can remember our history."

That integration of black history into everyday lessons would go far, Mr. Rogers said, but it won't come easy.

"We should have black history integrated in the curriculum, so it becomes American history, yet knowing what we've been through - 300 years of slavery and the many years more of segregation and how that's been left out of textbooks - then we do need Black History Month to acknowledge that.

Dr. Barksdale agreed.

"I think it's important to keep Black History Month, but I do agree that it should be a part of American history. It's a dual role. We need to have it as part of the general story that is America, and the world, but as we don't have it right now, we need to keep it as a month because right now, while some history books do talk about the black experience, I'm not sure it's in an honest and forthright way," he said.

Just when that integration will occur remains to be seen.

Until it is, Mr. Lewis said, he and the historians and professors have work to do.

"We went from Black History Week to Black History Month, we'll get to black history year without it being a year and it just being history," he said. "We've got to keep it going. It's changing daily. If you don't keep it going you're going to forget. People are making history every day, so if you don't keep up with it, you're going to lose it.

"And if you lose your history, you can't use somebody else's."

Reach Kamille Bostick at (706) 823-3223 or kamille.bostick@augustachronicle.com.