Sweet Auburn: The Richest Negro Street in the World

In nineteen fifty-six, Fortune magazine published a profile of Auburn Avenue in Atlanta and called it the richest Negro street in the world. The phrase stuck because the block it described was genuinely extraordinary, a dense concentration of Black-owned financial institutions, insurance companies, newspapers, hotels, and professional offices that existed nowhere else in the American South.

The street's transformation from an ordinary commercial avenue to the center of Black Atlanta's economic life unfolded during the Jim Crow era. When segregation hemmed Black Atlantans out of white banks, white insurance companies, white medical offices, and white theaters, entrepreneurs on Auburn Avenue built parallel institutions. The corner of the district's economic life rested on what contemporaries called the three-legged stool of Black finance. The first leg was the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, founded in nineteen oh five by Alonzo Herndon, a formerly enslaved man who had risen to become the city's first Black millionaire through his Peachtree Street barbershop. The second was Standard Life Insurance. The third was Citizens Trust Bank, which extended mortgage credit to Black homebuyers and loans to Black entrepreneurs that no white lending institution would touch.

The street had a patron saint and a name. John Wesley Dobbs, the Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons and the godfather of Black Atlanta political life, coined the name Sweet Auburn. He also organized the Atlanta Negro Voters League, which grew the Black electorate in the city from under two thousand registered voters in nineteen forty to more than twenty-two thousand by the early nineteen fifties. His grandson was Maynard Jackson, who in nineteen seventy-three became Atlanta's first Black mayor.

Sweet Auburn's prosperity declined after desegregation. When Black Atlantans could finally shop, bank, and live anywhere in the city, Auburn Avenue lost its captive customer base. But the street remains a national historic landmark, and the buildings that housed those Depression-era institutions still stand.