This week’s story
Before it was Auburn Avenue, it was Wheat Street. The street received its present name in 1893. In the early twentieth century, its Black-owned businesses, churches and civic organizations made the corridor a center of opportunity in a segregated city.
Civic leader John Wesley Dobbs coined the name “Sweet Auburn,” linking the neighborhood’s identity to the prosperity and possibility found there. Along the avenue stood institutions including Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium, Big Bethel AME Church, the Butler Street YMCA and the Municipal Market.
Sweet Auburn was also the world that helped shape Martin Luther King Jr. The larger community surrounding his Auburn Avenue birthplace served as an economic, cultural and religious center for Black Atlanta from the early twentieth century through the civil-rights era.
The history is not frozen in a photograph. The district was divided by interstate construction and has lost many historic buildings. What remains asks a living question: how does Atlanta grow without erasing the institutions, architecture and memories that made the city?
A little deeper into Sweet Auburn
Hidden Atlanta · Three stories you may not know
1. A segregated library planted the seed for a major archive
The Auburn Branch of the Carnegie Library opened in 1921 as Atlanta’s first public-library branch for African Americans. Librarian Annie L. McPheeters helped develop its Negro History Collection. That collection ultimately became part of the foundation of today’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History.
2. Atlanta had a pioneering Black multimedia storyteller
J. Richardson Jones used radio broadcasts, stage productions, “race movies” and wartime newsreels to celebrate Black life along Sweet Auburn. His reporting also documented racial violence, using film and journalism to challenge the images America saw of Black communities.
3. Votes helped bring basic city services to Black neighborhoods
Beginning in the late 1940s, the Atlanta Negro Voters League used organized Black voting power to press city leaders for improvements including streetlights, paved streets, garbage collection, sidewalks and school buildings. The gains were limited by segregation, but they showed how coordinated voting could change everyday life.
The Black-built complex that made room for a city
More than a building
Opened in 1912–13, the Odd Fellows Building and Auditorium was Atlanta’s first large-scale Black-owned, Black-operated multipurpose complex. Its offices gave Black doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs professional space when segregation shut them out elsewhere.
Next door, the auditorium became a rare stage where Black audiences could sit on the main floor and Black performers could command the room. Business, organizing and entertainment all shared one address.
A newspaper turned one Atlanta block into a national voice
The press on Auburn Avenue
William Alexander Scott II founded the Atlanta World in 1928. Four years later it became the Atlanta Daily World—the first successful Black daily newspaper in the United States.
From its Auburn Avenue office, the paper reported Black life, business, politics and injustice while building a chain of newspapers that carried Atlanta’s perspective across the country.
Mom’s Auburn Lounge, 1979
Atlanta time capsule
A Historic American Buildings Survey photograph preserves the storefront at 262 Auburn Avenue—one frame in a much larger visual record of the district.
Preservation is part of the story
Then & now
The National Park Service designated the Sweet Auburn National Historic Landmark District in 1976. A later federal assessment reported that the district had lost 47 percent of its contributing historic buildings. The newsletter can make that change visible—pairing archival photographs with present-day images, maps and memories from readers.
