Intro to SA

THE BUILDINGS OF SWEET AUBURN AVENUE
 Sweet Auburn Historic District
Atlanta, Georgia USA -A History from 1865-2025
Good Deeds expand and sail into the future, creating multiple dimensions of rich experience for those beings born there. Buildings are deeds of human thought, constructed to pragmatically improve energy flow in multiple dimensions: economic, social and architectural responsiveness being manifested in wood, concrete and brick. These are the buildings of Sweet Auburn.
PROLOG More financial institutions, professionals, educators, entertainers and politicians were on this one mile of street than any other African American street in the US. Auburn Avenue was “paved in gold” observed John Wesley Dobbs. The buildings represent and helped shape the activities that created Sweet Auburn’s multiple dimensions of economic and social complexity and MLk’s early consciousness. This environment eventually powered and energized culture everywhere to move forward.

BUILDINGS ARE REPRESENTATIVES  OF PEOPLE AND THEIR VALUES MADE CONCRETE: The built multiverses of Sweet Auburn changed the world as MLK’s early consciousness was formed in this thriving environment. Old buildings are concrete, tactile history and today the buildings on Auburn Avenue honor the undying energy and tenacity of organized groups of people operating without the benefit of  social and economic integration between 1865 and 1965, enforced by legal and socially accepted “norms”.
The bonding, creativity, energetic organization and ongoing legal wins of people with the purpose of improving life, created a thriving economic community. Combined with the six centers of higher education adjacent to this street, MLK’s early awareness was created in this multi-dimensional environment which was like no other in the world.

PEOPLE WHO BUILT BUILDINGS: “Mayor” John Wesley Dobbs and others helped create this bountiful world. “Books, bucks and ballots”   was observed and widely expounded and practiced by those who heard and could.

A GOLDEN ERA IN BUILDINGS BECAUSE OF HUMAN TENACITY: Every person needs as many opportunities as possible to be as good as they can get. But lurking at the Sweet Auburn periphery and forming a dense, ugly wall of restrictions and fears were Jim Crow Laws and a Race Riot of 1906 (see Legal Wins). The Race Riot was early fake media  started by a newspaper trying to sell papers.
After the riot people with pigmented skin began to withdraw to the Sweet Auburn area to live and run their businesses for safety. Good orderly direction was triumphant over the burning stings of segregation and from the 1920’s through the 1940’s Sweet Auburn Avenue was at the height of its social vigor. The buildings on the left reflect this and the organized purpose and energy of the people who built and populated them. These people, the building’s and the adjacent Atlanta University Center enabled a vast network of interconnected, well-educated people to energetically work together, build a cosmopolitan life. People had been working on Civil Rights since the Civil War and all the Wins culminated  as Sweet Auburn created the perfect womb for MLK to lead the world to Civil Rights legislation.
EXODUS: After this golden era, the west side of Atlanta around the Atlanta University Center became a more fashionable area to locate an African American business or residence. After Martin Luther King changed the world with Civil Rights, vast new worlds of economic, social choices and opportunities opened up and the exodus of energetic business people from the area was furthered.
PRESENT DAY SWEET AUBURN BUILDINGS: Actions to neighborhood buildings can happen by both people with value systems that don’t understand buildings (see 148 Edgewood) and natural catastrophe. Here is a history from SweetAuburnWorks.com:   https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bb33afd070aa44548212c745813ecf6b 
Also see 2025 Maps.

“SWEET AUBURN”
A passage from Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn by Gary Pomerantz pages 123-124, describes Auburn Avenue between 1924 and 1938, through the viewpoint of “Mayor” John Wesley Dobbs ; called “The Grand” and that’s his interactive head bust on Auburn Ave―the onlooker can see through Dobbs eyes looking down the street of which he was immensely proud of being a part:

“When Citizens spoke of Auburn, that’s what they meant: the churches, clubs, barbershops, shoeshines, small businesses, restaurants and banks between the Rucker Building and the Yates and Milton Drugstore. Once it had been called Wheat Street, but in 1893 white residents successfully petitioned the city council to change it to Auburn Avenue, convinced it had a more stylish sound. By the 1930s some called Auburn the “Black Peachtree,” though, physically, that was a bit of a stretch since Peachtree wound north of the city and continued for many miles. In its entirety, Auburn Avenue ran little more than a mile and a half. Yet even as developer Hermon Perry triggered a housing boom for blacks on the west side, Auburn remained the spiritual center of black Atlanta.”

The three legged stool of black finance the Citizens Trust Bank (of which Dobbs was among the original directors), Mutual Federal Savings & Loan and Alonzo  Herndon’s Atlanta Life Insurance Company was located on Auburn.
To walk the Avenue on any summer evening was to experience the vitality of black life in the city: the sounds of ragtime from the Top Hat, the smell of fried chicken from Ma Suttons and the constant hum of animated street chatter. It became the place for black dreamers.
You knew you had arrived on the Avenue once you had your own pulpit or your own cornerstone. Henry Rucker, Alonzo Herndon and Benjamin J. Davis already had erected buildings on Auburn and soon Dobbs would have his.

“Sweet Auburn Avenue” is what the Grand began to call it, in honor of the timeless Oliver Goldsmith poem from 1770, “The Deserted Village”.

Money made the Avenue sweet, Dobbs said, and through voter registration he would make it even sweeter.

The Following is text from the audio narration Will The Circle Be Unbroken?
NARRATOR: Segregated by Jim Crow laws, Atlanta’s black population developed a network of independent businesses, churches, and community institutions, including a remarkable cluster of five black colleges around Atlanta University.

Former Atlanta mayor, Maynard Jackson
MAYNARD JACKSON: Where else have you had since 1865 a pouring into a city of trained black humanity, influenced by positive principles and values, like you’ve had here in Atlanta? They come from all over the world, all over the USA, and all over the world.
Literally. It’s almost like you can see a great hand reaching down and lifting Atlanta up, because of these colleges.
That made life a lot more bearable. It literally was a wheel within a wheel, a world within a world. Blacks could not go out to many white things, but whites came onto these campuses.

NARRATOR: While the colleges gave black Atlanta intellectual freedom, Auburn Avenue, the community’s commercial hub, provided jobs dependent on black consumers, not white bosses. Together, commerce, schools, and churches forged a strong middle class in the black community. Bill Calloway–a pioneer in the insurance industry…

W. L. CALLOWAY: Auburn Avenue was considered the almost nucleus so far as black businesses throughout America was concerned. It had more financial institutions than any other city.

NARRATOR: NAACP leader, Jondelle Johnson…
JONDELLE JOHNSON: Atlanta was a business Mecca. We had everything here that anybody just about had white. We had every kind of business, every kind of store, I’m talking about first class.

W. L. CALLOWAY: And that’s why John Wesley Dobbs, coined the
phrase “Sweet Auburn” Avenue because it said it was more sugar in that one block than in anywhere else in America. More concentration of financing, education and political awareness.