Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta

“A magnificent piece of writing, a beautiful tapestry of prose in which the stories of two of Atlanta’s most celebrated families have been woven densely into the history of the city itself.” —The New York Times

The Intersection of Peachtree Street, historically the residential and commercial street of Atlanta’s white elite, and Sweet Auburn Avenue, the spiritual main street of Atlanta’s community, mirrors the often separate but mutually dependent worlds of whites and blacks in this Southern city. In Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, Gary M. Pomerantz traces five generations of two families—the Allens, descended from slave owners, and the Dobbses, from slaves. These families produced the two most influential mayors of the modern South, Ivan Allen Jr., and Maynard Jackson Jr.

Through hundreds of interviews and five years of painstaking research, Pomerantz shows how the families rose to social, economic, and political prominence. But he also demonstrates how their interesting lives paralleled the shifting relations between Atlanta’s blacks and whites as the city grew to become the capital of the New South. It is a representative story of the transformation of a city and the entire south.