Picture Auburn Avenue in 1956, the year Fortune magazine called it the richest Negro street in the world. That designation, delivered during the height of the Jim Crow era, captured something remarkable: in a city and a region built to deny Black economic life, Auburn Avenue had produced a concentrated corridor of Black-owned businesses, insurance companies, newspapers, churches, fraternal organizations, and professional offices unmatched almost anywhere in the United States. The Atlanta Life Insurance Company, founded here by Alonzo Herndon, became one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
The Atlanta Daily World, founded here in 1928, was the first Black daily newspaper in the South. The Citizens Trust Bank, founded in 1921, is still operating today. The avenue was also home to the Prince Hall Masons, the Odd Fellows Building, and dozens of clubs and entertainment venues that made Auburn Avenue Atlanta's Black cultural hub from the 1920s through the 1960s.
Urban renewal and highway construction in the 1970s and 1980s cut deeply into the neighborhood's fabric. What remains is a remarkable archive of a community that built something extraordinary under impossible conditions.