Sweet Auburn: The Wealthiest Black Street in America

John Wesley Dobbs was a Masonic leader and civic organizer who gave Auburn Avenue its name in speeches he delivered in the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. He called it Sweet Auburn, and the name spread until it became official. Dobbs understood what the street represented and wanted a name equal to it.

By the first decades of the twentieth century, Auburn Avenue had become something rare: a concentrated corridor of Black economic and professional life in a Southern city that had made Black economic and professional life as difficult as law and custom could make it. The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, founded by Alonzo Herndon, was headquartered there. Herndon had been born into slavery in Social Circle, Georgia, walked to Atlanta after Emancipation, learned barbering, and built the most successful Black-owned barbershop in the city before pivoting to insurance. By the time he died, Atlanta Life was one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the United States.

The Atlanta Daily World, one of the country's leading Black newspapers, was on Auburn Avenue. The Butler Street YMCA was there. So were dentists, lawyers, real estate offices, churches, and eventually the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The street was not prosperous by the standards of white Atlanta, but by the standards of what was possible for Black Atlantans under segregation, it was extraordinary.

In nineteen fifty-six, Fortune magazine called it the richest Negro street in the world. A decade later, the city built Interstates Seventy-five and Eighty-five through the neighborhood. Urban renewal projects cut the district from the residential communities that had sustained it. What remains today is a preserved historic district anchored by the King sites, still significant, though the economic vitality that made the name possible did not survive the highway.