COLUMN ONE : Blacks Try to Rebuild Their Past : Across the country, preservationists are restoring the places where their forefathers lived and died. They hope their history will offer answers to today’s problems.

Between shows, the black vaudeville entertainers at the Morton Theater left brief messages to the future on the dressing room walls.

In 1919, Bob White used chalk to record the engagement of his minstrel group, the Dark Town Swells. Another graffito, scribbled in pencil, announces to posterity: “Joe Johnson’s 1931 Black Babies here June 8. Played 6 nights.”

Most of the entertainers would later fade into obscurity. The Morton began to fade with them, a relic not only of a passing entertainment but also a painful era of segregation. It closed in the 1950s and rapidly deteriorated. Few seemed to care.

Now, the graffiti and the theater have new life. In one of dozens of restoration efforts under way in black neighborhoods across the country, architects have been hired to shore up the Morton’s roof and to restore its dilapidated interior. In 1992, the theater will reopen as a cultural center and museum paying tribute to the vaudeville performers.

“At first, people said it was a crazy idea,” Linny Bailey, a 30-year-old attorney, recalled as he stood on the cobweb-covered stage. “But, when the scaffolding went up outside and the work got going, they finally started to believe.”

From New York’s Harlem to rural towns like Athens, historic preservation has found a new and growing constituency among middle-class blacks. They are the bankers, lawyers, city officials and others who care deeply for the simple wood-frame houses, the inner-city jazz clubs and the one-room schoolhouses of their racially segregated past.

Even a partial list of the places where black preservationists are now working reads like a primer of black American history:

In August, activists in New York won a fight to prevent the destruction of the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, site of the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.

In the Pleasant Hill community of Macon, Ga., preservationists are working to save the childhood home of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Little Richard.

Earlier this year, Los Angeles activists officially reopened the restored Dunbar Hotel, a Central Avenue landmark patronized by W.E.B. Du Bois, Duke Ellington and other black intellectuals and artists.

The Topeka, Kan., elementary school that figured in Brown vs. the Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation case, was named to the National Registry of Historic Places last year.

In response to the growing movement, the National Park Service and several states--including Georgia, Alabama and New York--have begun efforts to identify more sites in black communities that can be named to national and state registries of historic places.

The preservationists say their work is guided by a growing sense of urgency. Already, countless buildings have been lost because they are in inner-city communities under siege for decades by the ravages of urban decay.

Slumlords have allowed once-elegant apartment buildings to fall into disrepair. Waves of heroin addicts have converted older buildings into “shooting galleries.” In the 1960s, urban renewal projects bulldozed entire neighborhoods, then were often followed by the contemporary plagues of homelessness and crack cocaine.

Many preservationists say their efforts are important because black Americans must draw on the lessons of their history if they are to overcome the crises of unemployment and substance abuse that torment many communities across the country.

“If we don’t understand the history of the civil rights movement, we won’t be able to understand the barriers that we continue to face,” said D’Army Bailey, 48, a Memphis, Tenn., attorney who has led the effort to preserve the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.

Building a Memorial

A decade ago, the motel was a seedy eyesore, its rooms rented to prostitutes. At one time, it was slated for destruction. Then, in 1986, Bailey and a group of black businessmen began to lobby state and local officials to support a $10-million preservation project.

The motel is scheduled to open as a memorial to King in July, 1991, along with an adjacent museum honoring civil rights activists.

“The fuel for our movement of the future lies in what that motel represents,” Bailey said. “Telling the story of the Lorraine Motel and the struggle it symbolizes is an effort to keep alive that spirit of sacrifice, struggle and freedom.”

In several cities, the landmarks date from the 1920s Harlem Renaissance, an era that saw the creation of vibrant inner-city commercial strips not only on Lenox Avenue in New York but on streets such as Auburn Avenue in Atlanta and Central Avenue in Los Angeles.

The new-found interest in the landmarks may point to a growing angst among middle-class blacks who long ago left the downtown neighborhoods for racially integrated suburbs, said Lonnie Bunch, a historian at the Smithsonian Institution who worked on the preservation of the Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles.

“These (inner-city) communities (were) the homes of most black people in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” Bunch said. “They never thought of them in the historical sense. In the ‘60s, they moved to the suburbs. Now, they’re feeling isolated and disconnected from their past. This is the first generation of African-Americans that isn’t connected to the network of a downtown community.”

‘Disintegration’ Seen

Isolated from white society, central-city neighborhoods like Denver’s Five Points and Detroit’s Black Bottom were places where the working poor lived side by side with black lawyers and doctors. Barbers, haberdashers and other merchants catered to a growing clientele of migrants from the rural South.

Community self-sufficiency was then the principal survival strategy for a people faced with widespread prejudice and segregation practices. Now, some black preservationists believe blacks have paid an unexpected price for the victories of the civil rights struggle.

“I don’t call it integration, I call it disintegration,” said Jeanne Lanier Rudd, manager of the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial Historic Site in Sedalia, N.C., just west of Greensboro. “We lost the caring attitude of the teachers when we integrated. You became a number.”

Once an elite prep school for black children, the historic site is named for the educator who founded the school in 1902. Although its renovation is not yet complete, the school was added to North Carolina’s registry of historic places in 1987, the first in the state to honor a black American.

In Detroit, state officials dedicated a historic preservation district this month in Conant Gardens, a relatively affluent community of black homeowners established in the 1920s.

“Many of our young people in Detroit believe black history begins when Coleman Young became mayor (in 1974),” said Janese Chapman, 32, a city specialist in historic preservation. “They didn’t know about anything that came before. That scared me . . . . If you don’t pique their interest, a lot of this stuff will be gone.”

Indeed, black Detroit’s entertainment district, Paradise Valley, was almost completely obliterated in the mid-1960s by the construction of the Chrysler Freeway.

“When those things were demolished to make way for better things, we also lost a way of life,” Chapman said. “Paradise Valley was more than just businesses. It was people taking care of people. They made sure no black people went hungry in the city of Detroit.”

Historic preservation can also have very practical benefits. Touring the landmarks of black America has become a growing industry.

Magazines such as Ebony and Black Enterprise periodically publish tour guides of the historic sites of the South and Northeast. This year, more than 1 million people will visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site in Atlanta.

New York City has established a Marcus Garvey Walking Tour--brass plaques mark important sites in the life of the founder of nation’s first black nationalist movement. And at least four separate touring companies compete to take busloads of mostly European and Japanese sightseers to Harlem landmarks.

One company offers a “Champagne Jazz Safari” of Harlem’s nightclubs. Unfortunately, many of the famous Harlem clubs of the big-band era have been destroyed, including the Cotton Club and the Savoy Theater.

Ballroom Saved

Old buildings fall in Harlem with predictable regularity. Yet another Harlem landmark, the Audubon Ballroom, was scheduled for destruction earlier this year. Columbia University, owner of the property, had slated the site for a biological research laboratory.

A broad coalition of black community groups opposed the project, however, calling it an affront to the memory of Malcolm X. The militant revolutionary was killed at the ballroom when addressing a group of followers on Feb. 21, 1965.

“Malcolm X is emerging as such a gigantic figure in African-American life,” said Michael Adams, a Columbia graduate student who helped to lead the effort to save the Audubon. “And here you have this great cultural landmark associated with his memory. We couldn’t understand why they were so willing to see it swept aside.”

The university finally agreed in August to preserve most of the building and to create a memorial to the slain activist.

Heartened by the success, Adams helped to establish the Upper Manhattan Society for Progress Through Preservation. The group aims to save those landmarks still standing amid the burned-out shells of tenement buildings that line many Harlem streets.

In many ways, Harlem is a leader in the nationwide black preservation movement; four Harlem neighborhoods are designated as historic districts. Attracted by the renovated 19th-Century homes and the pleasant, tree-lined streets, several middle-class blacks have moved into the Harlem neighborhoods, including a few high-ranking members of the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins.

Still, countless other important Harlem landmarks are not protected by historic-district status. Adams said his group would like to protect the fashionable apartment buildings on Edgecomb Avenue in the Sugar Hill district. High on a bluff overlooking the East River and the Bronx, Sugar Hill epitomized the style and grace of New York’s black elite.

Nor was historic status granted to the Lafayette Theater, a key venue in the development of the 1920s Harlem jazz scene.

While walking through Harlem with a visitor on one recent afternoon, Adams nearly wept when he discovered workmen using jackhammers to blast apart the Lafayette’s 80-year-old terra cotta facade. The workers, he said, had effectively ruined the theater’s historic character.

“Oh, my God, they’ve started the destruction!” Adams cried out as he approached the building. Reaching into a trash bin, he picked up pieces of the facade already discarded by the workers. “All of this beautiful terra cotta ornamentation . . . as if it were so much garbage.”

The theater, Adams explained, had for years been home to a black church. A recently appointed minister had decided to replace the old facade and its cornices with an austere, modern-looking exterior.

Adams said he has had similar experiences with other Harlem residents who do not share his passion for historic preservation. Many believe “new is better than old,” he said. Others equate historic preservation with gentrification, in which white buyers snap up properties in neighborhoods that appear to be ripe for renovation and higher property values.

Partly to address these and other concerns, preservationists in Macon, Ga., have developed an original plan to combine historic restoration with a program to provide decent housing for Macon’s disadvantaged residents.

Pleasant Hill, the heart of Macon’s black community, was declared a national historic district in 1986. The designation qualifies homes in the area for historic rehabilitation tax credits. Together with federal low-income housing grants, the tax credits have made possible the restoration of more than a dozen tumbledown houses.

“We don’t want to preserve just monuments,” said Maryel Battin of the Macon Heritage Foundation. “The more critical need is to preserve Pleasant Hill as a community and to upgrade its housing stock.”

The foundation recently helped rehabilitate a row of “shotgun” houses--frame buildings with front and back doors coincidentally aligned so that it is possible to fire a shot straight through without hitting a wall.

Some of the shotgun houses were originally built on alleys behind the homes of affluent whites as living quarters for their servants. Later, they became standard housing throughout Pleasant Hill. Several have since burned down. But still standing, among the vacant lots, is the childhood home of Little Richard, the flamboyant “architect of rock ‘n’ roll.”

Publicity surrounding the proposed restoration of Little Richard’s home, along with others in the community, has already inspired several Pleasant Hill residents to begin fixing up their homes, said Howard L. Scott, director of the Booker T. Washington Community Center.

“It makes the guy who has no money, but who does have a hammer, get excited about his place,” Scott said. “People are learning about the richness of Macon history. Once that happens, people are going to feel better about themselves because they’re from Macon. It gives us hope for the rebirth of our community.”