By Logan Bernard and Amora Graydon
NABJ JSHOP Reporters
As you walk down the historic streets of downtown Atlanta, specifically the Sweet Auburn district, you might come across a small brown brick building known as the African American Panoramic Experience, otherwise known as the APEX Museum, which houses the numerous untold truths of African history and protects the lasting legacy of African American heritage.
The mission of this monumental harbor of history is to tell the stories from their perspectives. They aim to get the truth out to their guests who come to visit from all around the world so they won’t be filled with the desensitized view points that the world reinforces. They tell their stories beginning with teachings on the African diaspora to substantiate the idea that Africa is more than enslavement and the horrors that it brought. Its history lies beyond the betrayal they witnessed.
“If we teach that history or preserve that history that people don’t normally talk about or know about, I feel like there would be better conversations and a foot in the right direction,” Kyler Winston-Kendrick says.
Winston-Kendrick, their resident historian and lead curator for about four years, specializes in the African diaspora. When asked about what inspired her to choose this career path, she expressed how she loved the personal research aspect of it because she likes to step outside the box when it comes to education. Her parents fostered within her at a young age that there is more to the story than what we are forced to learn in school. Because of this, she and her family would constantly take road trips to different Black history museums in places like Alabama and Tennessee to get her more familiar with the good and ugly parts of history instead of just staying comfortable in the “eurocentric way of thinking.”
The APEX Museum is the oldest Black history museum in Atlanta and has been preserving and showing artifacts from many different centuries. Every day, the museum honors the legacy of African American history while also valuing wisdom and resilience. Right as you walk into the museum, the presence of African American history is extremely apparent.
“History can be good, bad and ugly, so I feel like that is the stuff we should be focusing on rather than the whitewashed way of history,” Winston-Kendrick said.
As time goes on, the APEX Museum continues to share the history that may go unnoticed when talking about African American history to hundreds of people from all around the world.
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