Sweet Auburn: A Name Whispered with Pride

Lyrics

You won't find it on a map from nineteen-twenty.
Not on the official city ledger.
Just a name... spoken soft... like a secret you're trusted with.

It started in the air, I think. A taste.
Not sugar, something richer.
Magnolia in the humid afternoon.
Frying fish from that little place by the Atlanta Life building.
The clatter of the streetcar on its iron tracks.
The slow, steady creak of a porch swing keeping time.
A whole world humming on a single block.
A world we built with our own two hands.

They never wrote it on a signpost, hammered it in brass.
It wasn't a name that was given.
It was a name that was earned.
A whisper on the wind, a promise taking turn.
We called it Sweet Auburn.
Just us.
We called it Sweet.

I remember hearing Mister Dobbs. John Wesley Dobbs.
Not from a stage, but from the steps of the Prince Hall Temple.
His voice, a low fire.
Talking about a street of our own making.
'The richest Negro street in the world,' he'd say.
And you felt it.
Not just in Alonzo Herndon's tall brick building...
...but in the polish on a barber's chair, in the ink of the Daily World, in a policy paid on time.

They never wrote it on a signpost, hammered it in brass.
It wasn't a name that was given.
It was a name that was earned.
A whisper on the wind, a promise taking turn.
We called it Sweet Auburn.
Just us.
We called it Sweet.

Sweet was the opposite of the signs we had to read downtown.
Sweet was the taste of walking into a bank where your money was wanted.
The sound of WERD radio from an open window.
Sweet was the feeling that this piece of pavement, this stretch of life...
was ours.
Wholly and completely ours.
A shelter from the bitter world outside.

So no... you won't find it on the old maps.
You have to listen.
It's still there.
In the echo between the buildings.
Sweet...
Sweet Auburn.