The Rise and Fall of the "Richest Black Street in the World": Sweet Auburn, Atlanta

In 1956, Fortune magazine called one street in Atlanta the richest Negro street in the world. It was not an exaggeration. On four blocks of Auburn Avenue you could find an insurance company holding millions in assets, a bank, a daily newspaper, the first radio station in America owned by a Black man, and a nightclub where Little Richard, Ray Charles and James Brown all played. A dollar could go around Sweet Auburn five or six times before it ever left the neighborhood. That street was born out of violence. After the Atlanta massacre of 1906, Black business owners learned that a storefront in the white downtown could be destroyed in a single night, so they moved east and bought their own buildings. What they built over the next fifty years included Alonzo Herndon, born into slavery, who turned a barbershop into Atlanta Life Insurance; John Wesley Dobbs, a railway mail clerk who registered twenty thousand Black voters and gave the street its name; and a house at 501 Auburn Avenue where Martin Luther King Jr. was born. Then it ended — and not in the way you would expect. Nobody bulldozed Auburn Avenue. The community actually fought the expressway and won, forcing the state to move the route. This documentary explains what happened instead: a highway that cut the street in two and gave it no exit ramp, and a victory in 1964 so complete that it took the street's own customers away forever. Today the King birth home draws visitors from every continent, while roughly half the storefronts around it are boarded up — and the city is now planning to spend hundreds of millions to cover the highway back up. Who gets that land is still being decided. All historical images and footage used in this video are either in the public domain, properly licensed, or used under the fair use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act) for purposes of historical commentary, education and research. This video contains original narration, research and editorial commentary, and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any organization mentioned. If you own the rights to any material used here and believe it has been used improperly, please contact us and it will be credited or removed promptly. #BlackHistory #SweetAuburn #Atlanta #BlackWallStreet #ForgottenPlaces