NoirDynosaur
Yurrrrrrrrrr
Daniel A. Moore Sr. at the APEX Museum in Atlanta in 2023. His focus was on the whole African American experience, from Africa to the Middle Passage, and from enslavement to the civil rights movement and beyond.
Daniel A. Moore Sr., who created a pioneering African American history museum in Atlanta when such initiatives were rare, died on March 4 in Decatur, Ga. He was 88.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Dan Moore Jr.
Mr. Moore started his eclectic collection of artifacts in 1978 and in 1984 moved it to a handsome 1910 brick building on Auburn Avenue, known as “Sweet Auburn” for its centrality to African American history. The building, which had been a schoolbook depository and a tire warehouse, was “erected brick by brick by African American masons,” the museum says.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born on Auburn, in an old wood-frame house, and the avenue is home to the King Center, which was founded in 1968 and is dedicated to his life and thought.
Mr. Moore took a longer view, though memories of the civil rights movement were still fresh when he was getting started, with help from a handful of well-off patrons and from Fulton County, which donated the land. Unlike the King Center, his focus was on the whole African American experience, from Africa to the Middle Passage, and from enslavement to the civil rights campaign and beyond.
The museum’s name, APEX, an acronym for the African American Panoramic Experience, reflected Mr. Moore’s ambition to “make sure they see the other side of us — they see that there is a genius in us,” as he put it in 2004 in an interview for The History Makers, a digital archive of interviews with significant Black Americans.
Mr. Moore, in dark suit at center, during a ribbon-cutting ceremony in 1984 marking his APEX Museum’s move to a renovated building on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta. Holding the ceremonial scissors was Kathleen Redding Adams (1890-1993), a schoolteacher who lived on Auburn and who survived a 1906 riot in Atlanta in which white mobs killed dozens of Black residents.Credit...APEX Museum
His message was directed as much at Black people as at white. “If I believe that my history began in the hole of a slave ship, I begin thinking like a slave, with a slave mentality,” Mr. Moore said in the interview.
To be sure, the long history of slavery has been part of the experience for museum visitors — his son Dan recalled that his father had put shackles on display — but it was far from the only part. The Smithsonian donated some artifacts, and trips to Africa by Mr. Moore helped stock the museum. (The museum, which occupies the building’s ground floor, says it attracts about 60,000 visitors a year.)
APEX has been nothing if not heterogeneous. “A replica of one of Atlanta’s first Black-owned businesses, the Yates & Milton Drug Store, is in its main space, jarringly shared with a cutaway display of the inside of a slave ship,” the critic Edward Rothstein of The New York Times wrote in 2007. He added, “In a theater meant to resemble a trolley’s interior, one film pays tribute to Sweet Auburn; another recounts the history of Africa.”
The museum has also presented exhibits on African culture and accomplished African Americans in the sciences.
Mr. Moore had grown up in an era when, as he told The History Makers, the only Black figures he learned about in school were Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
His consciousness of other Black contributions to history came with a deepening knowledge of Africa and of the civil rights movement, he said. He was especially inspired by an encounter in 1978 with Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the longtime president of Morehouse College, the historically Black institution in Atlanta, who was a mentor to Dr. King, Julian Bond and others in the movement. “The trigger event was meeting Dr. Mays at this banquet,” his wife, Estella Moore, said in a phone interview.
“When I sat at that table,” Mr. Moore recalled, “and I heard the accolades about Dr. Mays, the first thing that came in my mind is, ‘Why isn’t there an African American museum in this city that honors men and women like Dr. Mays, who has accomplished so much?’”
He told The History Makers: “We had better be responsible for interpreting our own history. If we are not responsible, if we don’t do that, we will run the risk of someone else saying what our history is and omitting or changing or embellishing, or not embellishing, information or facts that they don’t agree with or feel we should know.”
This brotha has done a tremendous amount of work revitalizing and acknowledging the rich cultural history of Black America. May god bless his soul
