Sweet Auburn Walk

Before desegregation, along Auburn Avenue, its cross streets, and a few parallel streets, black residents in the South found a self-contained community where they could go about daily life free from racial harassment while operating and patronizing restaurants, markets, barbershops, dry good stores, doctors' offices, theaters, and nightclubs, and where they established churches, banks, funeral homes, newspapers, insurance companies, fraternal organizations, and their homes. Known across America as a center of activity among black people in the South, the neighborhood was considered so rich with opportunities for advancement that John Wesley Dobbs, inspired by an Oliver Goldsmith poem, called it Sweet Auburn and said that three keys to liberation existed there: ballots, bucks, and books.

Atlanta, Georgia · United States