Auburn Avenue and the World King Was Born Into

Martin Luther King Junior was born on January fifteenth, nineteen twenty-nine, in a Queen Anne house at five hundred one Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, the son of a Baptist pastor and the grandson of another. He grew up on a street that Fortune magazine would later call, in nineteen fifty-six, the richest Negro street in the world.

That was not hyperbole in the way that promotional language usually is. In the first half of the twentieth century, Auburn Avenue was the economic and cultural spine of Black Atlanta in a way that had no exact parallel anywhere else in the South. The Standard Life Insurance Company was there. The Atlanta Daily World, one of the country's leading Black newspapers, was there. The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, founded by Alonzo Herndon, a formerly enslaved man who had walked to Atlanta and built himself into a millionaire, had its headquarters on Auburn Avenue. Barbers, dentists, lawyers, real estate agents, and morticians served a community that could not access white-owned businesses in the segregated city and built their own professional economy in response.

John Wesley Dobbs, a Masonic leader and civic organizer, was the one who gave the street its name Sweet Auburn. He used the phrase in speeches and it stuck. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference later put its headquarters on the same block.

The civil rights movement that Martin Luther King Junior came to lead did not emerge from abstraction. It emerged from institutions: the church his grandfather built, the professional class his neighbors constituted, the network of organizational life that Auburn Avenue had been sustaining for fifty years before King gave his first sermon. The street is a National Park Service site now. The house at five hundred one is preserved. The Ebenezer Baptist Church where his grandfather and his father both preached is two blocks west. His grave is between them.