IN ADDITION to the usual basketball fervor, there will be another outbreak of "March madness" at the University of Maryland, College Park early in the spring. That's when teams from Maryland elementary and middle schools will compete at Stamp Student Union in the finals of the Black Saga Competition.

Picture a combination of It's Academic, Jeopardy and a geography bee, as kids search their memories for the dates, facts and figures of black history. The children compete in teams of three as parents and teachers cheer them on. To succeed, they must successfully answer rigorous questions about people, places and events dating to the great West African empires of 500 to 1600.

Quick: Name those empires (Ghana, Mali and Songhai). Name the first female African-American U.S. Cabinet secretary (Patricia Roberts Harris, 1979). Name the Revolutionary War African-American credited with sending British Maj. John Pitcairn to his final reward (Peter Salem).

Those aren't questions the average guy on the street can answer. Indeed, Black Saga seems a throwback to an era in which rote learning was respectable. It also seems to work. A video of last year's state competition (won by West Annapolis Elementary School) shows children demonstrating uncanny knowledge.

The judges couldn't believe it. "I thought I knew something about African-American history," said Frank Kober, associate dean of education at Coppin State College. "But these kids knew more than I did."

They know more than about 85 percent of the public, said Charles M. Christian, 61, a professor of geography at College Park who organized Black Saga a decade ago and runs the competition as a sort of one-man show with lots of volunteer help.

Christian was upset over what had happened to Black History Month, started in 1926 by the black historian Carter G. Woodson.

February, said Christian, had become a "month of disappointment," as America focused on a handful of role models - Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. and so on - while largely ignoring the major themes of the black experience in America.

"Also, much of what was mentioned was the blood and gore of black history, the lynchings, for example," he said. "We needed an unintimidating way of understanding the black experience without insulting the African-American or condemning white America. This is the only way I know to do it."

So Christian worked for seven years on a chronology of African-American history, Black Saga: The African American Experience (Houghton Mifflin, 608 pages, $35). He started the competition in 1992 at Beltsville Academy, then a majority-white public school in Prince George's County. When Rosemont and Gwynns Falls elementary schools in West Baltimore hold a ceremony tomorrow to kick off their participation, the competition will have extended to nearly 400 kids in 50 schools.

Christian, a descendant of slaves who calls himself an "urban social geographer," supported the contest for seven years with proceeds from sales of his book. In 1999, College Park chipped in with a major grant.

Black Saga's genius is that it doesn't require memorization of facts in isolation. It's much easier when history is spread out like a theme park. "The idea is to connect the factual information so that kids understand the themes and bring their background knowledge - and that of their parents - to bear," Christian said. "I call it the connective tissue of history."

The most successful teams divide up the chores, said William Veater, principal of Beltsville Academy. One team member might specialize in the major court cases in African-American history, such as Brown vs. Board of Education. Another might concentrate on blacks in sports. Although precisely 804 sample questions have been culled for the competition from Christian's chronology, even a genius of a 10-year-old can't handle that volume.

All of the Baltimore kids new to Black Saga will get signed copies of Christian's book, and Sandra Ashe, the Rosemont principal, said she has every intention of reaching the finals in March. "I believe my kids can compete with any other kids in the state if given the right preparation and encouragement," she said.

There won't be white competitors from Ashe's all-black school, but whites have been eager participants since Black Saga started in 1992, Christian said. "We forget that black history is American history."