After laboring for 35 years amid old newspapers, scrapbooks and photos to piece together the history of Miami’s black community, Dorothy Jenkins Fields has a major milestone in sight.

By next year, Fields and her Black Archives History and Research Foundation will have a sparkling new home adjacent to Overtown’s famed Lyric Theater, which will be marking its 100th anniversary. The oldest live theater in Miami, the Lyric in its heyday presented such cultural giants as poet Langston Hughes and opera singer Marian Anderson.

The $10 million Lyric Theatre Welcome Center Complex at 819 NW Second Ave. will include an expanded stage, redone dressing rooms, rehearsal space and an upgraded sound system as well as the Black Archives Center complete with classrooms and meeting spaces. It is the third and final phase of the project.

“It will be an epicenter not only in arts but we will provide training in literary, visual, performing and culinary arts,’’ said Fields, 69.

Construction, which is about 70 percent complete, was halted a year ago because of a criminal investigation of one of the contractors. The probe is ongoing, but the county, city and Black Archives are working to untangle issues that includes a lien filed by the since-fired contractor, said Michael Spring, head of the county’s Cultural Affairs Department, which is overseeing the project.

In the meantime, contractors are working on the roof to seal the building, said Spring, who estimates it is six months from completion.

“We’re going to get there,’’ he said. “It’s just that this investigation threw a wrench into everything.’’

When the facility finally opens, it will be the culmination of a dream for Fields, who grew up in Miami in a family of role models. Her mother, whose family settled in Overtown (then called Colored Town) in 1903, was one of seven children, all of whom graduated from college. In the 1950s, one of Fields’ uncles, John D. Johnson, became Miami’s second black municipal judge. Another uncle, Dr. S.H. Johnson, in the 1930s became the first radiologist to serve Miami’s black community.

“By the time I was in third grade I realized that no one else that I knew had a family with all these professional people and I just knew that I would never be able to accomplish nearly what they accomplished,’’ Fields said.

She began her career as a librarian and reading teacher at Miami-Dade’s Myrtle Grove Elementary School in 1966. While preparing for the nation’s bicentennial celebration in 1976, she tried to gather historical information about Miami’s black community.

A local librarian told her the only black-history information she found was a folder of obituaries. “Those people haven’t thought enough of themselves to write their history,” the librarian told her.

Fields had found her cause.

She approached Ruth F. Braddock, who was writing a book about women’s roles in Miami-Dade, and in 1974 began working out of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. For two years she researched women and blacks in Miami-Dade, developing curriculum, visiting schools and teaching students about her findings.

Word of Fields’ work spread, and in 1977, with help from the National Council of Negro Women, she moved the Archives to its current home at the Joseph Caleb Auditorium, 5400 NW 22nd Ave.

Today, its collection includes 600 boxes of documents as well as photos, posters, billboards, blueprints, dresses, irons, shoes, dolls and even a midwife’s bag that trace the story of Miami’s black community from the city’s founding in 1896.

“Some people just want to go through pictures of what the houses looked like in the ’40s and ’50s,” said Nneka Hanchard, an archivist who has worked there since 2006. “People even well up because they remember their grandma who used to live there.”

The Archives’ collection centers on Overtown and the Lyric Theater, which it owns. Opened by Georgia native Geder Walker in 1913, it presented vaudeville acts, plays and movies and was a major part of Overtown’s cultural life into the 1960s. The projection booth used to show movies is the original structure built in 1913.

The Archives also has bought and restored The Dorsey House, which was built at 250 NW Ninth St. in 1920 by D.A. Dorsey, Miami’s first black millionaire, and Dr. S.H. Johnson’s X-ray clinic at 171 NW 11th St., the first private medical facility for blacks in Miami-Dade, begun by Fields’ uncle.

“It’s exciting to see that we are preserving our own history to share with others,’’ said Fields, who still remembers the woman on the phone telling her that blacks were indifferent to their history.

Reflecting on it now, Fields knows what she would say: “We care. We cared then, we care now. We will always care.’’