Not so very long ago, celebrations of Black History Month -- or its predecessor, Black History Week -- were largely confined to schools, where students wrote essays and reports about black legends like George Washington Carver, Phyllis Wheatley or Booker T. Washington.

Now churches sponsor Heritage Day concerts; major universities host lectures, panel discussions, plays and dance performances by noted black troupes; and major television networks air poignant documentaries about slavery, the Tuskegee experiment, Adam Clayton Powell, Josephine Baker and the Freedom Riders.

In a recent broadcast of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Morgan Freeman scorned the annual celebration.

“You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” he bellowed. “I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.”

The venerable actor will get no argument here. Black history is in the country’s marrow. You cannot dissect any portion of the American story without turning up at least a fiber of blackness, if not whole cloth. No single month can do it justice.

But if Freeman meant Black History Month should be abandoned on the basis of its inadequacies -- and that is how his remarks have been conventionally interpreted -- I must respectfully disagree. As has been said, something is better than nothing.

The occasion’s recurrence and its expansion from one week (from 1926 through 1975) to one month (in 1976) has made Black History Month a more potent commemoration. It takes more stories to fill the spaces now.

Every year, the inventory grows so that, in addition to Washington, Wheatley and Washington, other long-buried achievers are unearthed: the Rev. Garrison Frazier, who led the post-Civil War movement for land and protected rights; Tunis Campbell, who preached self-determination and led free blacks to set up a self-governing cooperative community off the Georgia coast; and the black soldiers who braved loneliness and arctic cold to help carve a highway across the Alaskan tundra.

Such stories have a way of seeping into the public consciousness as, indeed, does the designation of a commemorative month itself. Without intending to -- perhaps without wanting to -- even the detached and distracted are bound to pick up something, if nothing other than the idea that black life is something to celebrate.

At the very least, therefore, the month is valuable for consciousness-raising, the first step toward correction. It can be a painfully slow process, but incremental progress beats none.

What Freeman prefers is, of course, the ideal. But, then, if all were fair, his point would be moot since there would never have been racially distinctive histories on these shores to begin with. There most certainly would not have been the vile, despicable history that essentially defines the United States.

Of course, all is not fair and, without intervention and innovation, it stands no chance of becoming so. Holidays and designated months do have an artificial quality about them, forcing recognition and tribute where they might otherwise not occur.

But then, affirmative action, school desegregation and anti-discrimination housing and hiring laws did not exactly spring from the sweet earth either. Had we waited for the society to naturally evolve to those circumstances, we might still be waiting to exhale.