Daniel A. Moore Sr., who created a pioneering African-American history museum in Atlanta when such initiatives were rare, died March 4 in Decatur, Ga. He was 88 years old.
His death, at the hospital, was confirmed by his son Dan Moore Jr.
Mr. Moore began his eclectic collection of artifacts in 1978 and in 1984 moved it to a beautiful 1910 brick building on Auburn Avenue, known as “Sweet Auburn” for its central place in African-American history. The building, which was a textbook warehouse and tire warehouse, “was built brick by brick by African-American masons,” the museum says.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Auburn, in an old log-frame house, and across the avenue is the King Center, established in 1968 and dedicated to his life and thought.
Mr. Moore saw more, though the memories of the civil rights movement were still fresh when he started, with the help of a handful of well-to-do patrons and from Fulton County, which donated the land. Unlike the King Center, its focus was on the entire African-American experience, from Africa to the Middle Passage, and from slavery 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 — see that there’s a genius in us,” as he put it in a 2004 interview for The History Makers, a digital archive of interviews with prominent black Americans;
His message was aimed at both blacks and whites. “If I believe that my story began in the hole of a slave ship, I begin to think like a slave, with a slave mentality,” Mr. Moore said in the interview.
Sure, the long history of slavery was part of the experience for museum visitors — Dan’s son recalled his father putting shackles on display — but it wasn’t the only part. The Smithsonian donated some artifacts, and Mr. Moore’s trips to Africa helped stock the museum. (The museum, which occupies the ground floor of the building, says it attracts about 60,000 visitors a year.)
APEX was nothing if not heterogeneous. “A replica of one of Atlanta’s first black businesses, the Yates & Milton Drug Store, sits in its main space, almost shared with a cutaway screen of the interior of a slave ship,” New York Times critic Edward Rothstein. He wrote in 2007. He added, “In a theater meant to look like the inside of a trolley, a film pays homage to Sweet Auburn. another tells the story of Africa.’
The museum has also featured exhibits on African culture and accomplished African Americans in the sciences.
Mr. Moore had grown up in a time when, he told The History Makers, the only black figures he learned about in school were Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver.
His awareness of other black contributions to history came with deepening his knowledge of Africa and the civil rights movement, he said. He was particularly inspired by a meeting in 1978 with Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the longtime president of Morehouse College, the historically Black institution in Atlanta, who mentored Dr. King, Julian Bond and others in the movement. “The trigger was meeting Dr. Mace at this symposium,” his wife, Estella Moore, said in a telephone interview.
“When I sat down at that table,” Mr. Moore recalled, “and heard the praise for Dr. Mays, the first thing that came to mind was, ‘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 better be responsible for our own interpretation of history. If we’re not responsible, if we don’t do that, we run the risk of someone else telling what our story is and omitting or changing or embellishing or not embellishing information or facts that they don’t agree with or feel we need to know.” .
Mr. Moore began his professional life as a self-taught filmmaker, making television commercials, promotional films for companies such as BellSouth, IBM and AT&T, and socially conscious documentaries about, among other topics, gang violence, life in prison (undertaken at the behest of Bill Cosby) and football player Gayle Sayers. When he moved from his native Philadelphia to Atlanta in 1974, he already ran a film company in that city and had plans to expand it to Atlanta, which had become America’s Black Mecca.
Africa was central to his inspiration. In the early 1970s he traveled to Liberia to make a film about that country – inspired and angered, he would later say, by images of the Tarzan films of his youth and “all those hundreds of natives running around”.
He was invited back by the family of Liberian President William Tolbert (who was later assassinated in a coup) to make a film for the country’s 150th anniversary celebrations. Mr Moore told The History Makers the experience was “extremely moving”, recalling filming “thousands of women in white singing and shouting as they saluted Ahmed Sékou Touré, the oppressive dictator of Guinea. (Mr. Moore was uncritical, however, in failing to mention the tortured stories of the leaders he filmed.)
Daniel Algernon Moore was born in Philadelphia on November 20, 1935, the youngest of 10 children to Edwin Lewis and Edith Lillian (Warring) Moore. His father, a carpenter, was a World War I veteran who had replaced the word “Negro” with “African” on his US Army ID card, a gesture that “gave us a sense of pride,” Mr. Moore recalled. .
He attended Edward Bok Vocational High School in Philadelphia with the intention of becoming a tailor, but after graduating he “ended up with a thousand different careers – drove a truck for a minute, drove a taxi, sold insurance, was always very good at sales.” he said.
In high school he was in charge of his school’s audio-visual department, he recalls, and that gave him a love of film that inspired his first effort, a documentary about a minister who works with Philadelphia’s gangs.
Along with his wife and son Dan Jr., Mr. Moore has another son, Edwin, and six grandchildren.
“In the ’70s, nobody was talking about an African-American museum,” Dan Jr. recalls. “The telling of Black history was skewed or unavailable.” He added, “Until it was over, it was beautiful.”
