Sweet Auburn Historic District

This guide to Atlanta's Sweet Auburn Historic District starts with an unlikely headline: in 1956, a business magazine called this one segregated street the richest of its kind on earth. You'll hear how Jim Crow laws pushed Atlanta's Black community onto Auburn Avenue, and how out of that exclusion grew Black-owned banks, a pioneering radio station, and the insurance empire of Alonzo Herndon, born enslaved and later the city's first Black millionaire. The guide walks the same stretch that self-styled unofficial mayor John Wesley Dobbs once patrolled, past Ebenezer Baptist Church and the house where a future civil rights leader was born. Stand between the church and the birth home as you listen.