Sweet Auburn, the Atlanta University Center and the city that became hip hop's center of gravity.
Sweet Auburn
John Wesley Dobbs called Auburn Avenue the richest Negro street in the world, and Sweet Auburn earned the name. Despite enormous legal and social obstacles, it grew into a celebrated concentration of Black businesses, newspapers, churches and nightclubs.
Alonzo Herndon founded Atlanta Life Insurance there in 1905. The Atlanta Daily World, founded on the avenue in 1928, became the first Black-owned daily newspaper. Ebenezer Baptist Church dates from 1886, and on the same avenue is the house where Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929. Sweet Auburn became a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
The Atlanta University Center
In southwest Atlanta, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman College and the Morehouse School of Medicine form the Atlanta University Center, the only contiguous group of historically Black colleges and universities in the country. Atlanta, Morehouse and Spelman signed the agreement that created it in April 1929.
The Student Movement
On March 9, 1960, students from the Atlanta University Center published An Appeal for Human Rights as a full-page advertisement in Atlanta's newspapers. Lonnie King chaired their committee, and Julian Bond was among those who drafted it. Six days later, more than two hundred students sat in at eleven restaurants downtown to end segregation in public places.
City Hall And The Airport
In 1973 Maynard Jackson was elected the first African American mayor of Atlanta. He greatly increased the share of city business going to minority-owned firms and helped push through the modernization of the airport's main terminal. After his death in 2003, the airport was renamed Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in his honor.
Black Atlanta Today
In the late 1980s L.A. Reid and Babyface founded LaFace Records in Atlanta, and by the mid-1990s Outkast, Goodie Mob and Organized Noize were building the Dirty South sound. Jermaine Dupri's So So Def, Lil Jon's crunk and the trap music that dominated rap in the 2010s followed, and the city moved from the margins to hip hop's center of gravity. Black-owned restaurants, salons, studios and brands are part of everyday Atlanta.
Shop Black-owned businesses in Atlanta on CashBlack.
Photo Credits
The Sweet Auburn Historic District. Photo: Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons The Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College. Photo: Thomson200, CC0, Wikimedia Commons Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue. Photo: Marc Merlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons