Citizens Trust Logo August 16, 1921, Citizens Trust Bank opened on

On

Citizens Trust Logo

The bank officially reorganized itself in 1927 with new articles of incorporation and bylaws. Clayton R. Yates was elected acting chairman of the board and Lorimer D. Milton was elected cashier-treasurer. A decade later, in 1938, Milton would become Citizens Trust's president and chief executive officer (CEO).

On March 5, 1933,

Citizens Trust Bank Founder

the day after being sworn into office, U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt declared a "bank holiday," which for four days forced the closure of the nation's banks and halted all financial transactions in an attempt to allow the new administration time to develop a plan to address the current banking crisis. Because of its sound operation, Citizens Trust was one of the first banks to reopen. Shortly thereafter, Citizens Trust became the first African American–owned bank to become a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. In 1948 Citizens Trust became the first African American–owned bank to join the Federal Reserve Bank.

In the 1950s Citizens Trust began investing in the development of housing subdivisions throughout

Old Citizens Trust Bank Building

In the mid-1960s Milton and his management team recognized the need for a new headquarters and planned a new facility at 75 Piedmont Avenue. After completion of the building, Milton retired. He had been an original employee of Citizens Trust during the Perry years and had guided the bank through the Great Depression, World War II (1941-45), and racial segregation. Citizens Trust had gone from approximately $300,000 in total assets at the beginning of his tenure to more than $26 million at the time he retired. In 1971 Charles Reynolds, the bank's executive vice president, succeeded Milton as president, and I. Owen Funderburg, president and CEO of Gateway National Bank in St. Louis, Missouri, became CEO and president in 1975.

Under Funderburg's leadership Citizens Trust expanded its role in the National Bankers Association, the trade group for the nation's minority-owned commercial banks. By 1985 Citizens Trust had increased its size to $96 million and was named bank of the year by Black Enterprise magazine. The magazine article touted Funderburg's effective management style and the advances made by the bank during his administration. By 1990 the bank was solidly over $100 million in size and often challenged Industrial Bank of Washington in Washington, D.C., and Seaway National Bank in Chicago, Illinois, as the largest black-owned commercial bank in the country. Funderburg retired in 1992, after seventeen years with Citizens Trust.

In 1992 William L. Gibbs was named Citizens Trust's new president and CEO. Under Gibbs, Citizens Trust continued its expansion program by opening new in-store branch offices in Cub Foods grocery stores, beginning with one on Lawrenceville Highway in Atlanta. The bank's new motto was "Strength through Progress."

In July 1997 Gibbs

Young and Stokes

resigned from Citizens Trust, and the bank decided to explore a merger with First Southern Bank, through which First Southern president James E. Young would assume the presidency of the new bank. The merger was finalized on January 30, 1998, and Young took the helm of the expanded Citizens Trust in February. Citizens Trust ended the month with approximately $191 million in total assets.

In June 1998 Citizens Trust, which was considered the leading church lender relative to its capital base in metropolitan Atlanta, solicited the partnership of three other minority-owned banks and loaned the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church $5.5 million to finance the construction of a new sanctuary.

In the spring of 1999, Young announced that the common stock of Citizens Trust was available in the public market, and the bank's stock began trading publicly. Additionally, Citizens Trust became the first and only African American–owned bank in the nation to become part of the Small Business Administration's Preferred Lender Program.

On March 10, 2000,

Citizens Trust Bank

Often referred to as the unofficial mayor of Auburn Avenue, John Wesley Dobbs was one of several distinguished African American civic and political

John Wesley Dobbs

Born in Marietta in 1882 to Minnie and Will Dobbs, John Wesley Dobbs grew up in poverty on a farm near Kennesaw. Two years after his birth his mother and father separated. His mother moved to Savannah to work in the home of a white family there, leaving Dobbs and his sister in the care of his grandparents and various other relatives. Minnie saw her children regularly, though, and in 1891 they moved to Savannah to live with her.

In Savannah Dobbs attended school full time for the first time. His formal education nearly ended after fifth grade because of his family's financial difficulties, but a white woman intervened and offered Dobbs a job that would not interfere with his school attendance. While still in grammar school, Dobbs also shined shoes and delivered newspapers to supplement the family income.

In 1897, at the age of fifteen, Dobbs moved to Atlanta, where he continued his education at Atlanta Baptist College (later Morehouse College). His mother's ill health forced Dobbs to drop out of school and return to Savannah to care for her. He never earned a college degree. He continued his studies independently, however, and passed a civil service exam that in 1903 allowed him to become a railway mail clerk for the U.S. Post Office in Atlanta. (Dobbs in fact would never stop studying, reading voraciously during his spare time.) Dobbs held his position at the post office, a well-respected one within the black community, for thirty-two years.

In 1906 Dobbs married Irene Ophelia Thompson, with whom he had six daughters, all of whom went on to become graduates of Spelman College in Atlanta. Mattiwilda Dobbs, his fifth daughter, became an acclaimed opera singer. Dobbs worked to instill in his children a sense of self-worth and a

Mattiwilda Dobbs

desire to succeed. He forbade them to attend segregated events and constantly reminded them of their equality. Additionally, he traveled with his family extensively to broaden their range of experience.

In 1911 Dobbs was initiated into the Prince Hall Masons, a fraternal order that attracted socially conscious leaders within the black middle class. Dobbs was elected Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons of Georgia in 1932, thereby earning the nickname "the Grand." Through his leadership position with the Masons, he tried to instill in Atlanta's African American community those same values he worked to pass on to his children.

Dobbs fervently believed that African American suffrage was the key to racial advancement. He announced a goal of registering 10,000 black voters in Atlanta and preached the importance of voter registration in Masonic halls, in African American churches, and on street corners. Dobbs also founded the Atlanta Civic and Political League in 1936 and, with attorney A. T. Walden, cofounded the Atlanta Negro Voters League in 1946. Both of these leagues advocated voter registration and black political unity.

Due largely to Dobbs's efforts, African Americans achieved two significant political victories in the late 1940s. In the spring of 1948 Atlanta mayor William B. Hartsfield fulfilled a promise he had made to Dobbs by hiring eight African American police officers. Although they could patrol only black neighborhoods and could not arrest whites, the hiring was a significant challenge to segregation. The following year Hartsfield fulfilled another campaign promise by installing street lamps on Auburn Avenue, the center of Atlanta's black community. Both of these achievements served to solidify Dobbs's position as a leader. (Dobbs himself coined the term "Sweet Auburn," an expression of the area's thriving businesses and active social and civic life.)

During the 1950s Dobbs continued his work toward African American equality. He constantly pressed Hartsfield to fulfill other promises made to the black community. Dobbs's influence began to wane, though, as the decade ended and a younger generation of African American leaders emerged at the forefront of the civil rights struggle. By this time he was suffering from arthritis, often unable to get out of bed.

Dobbs's health declined, and on August 21, 1961, he suffered a stroke. He died nine days later, on August 30, 1961, the same day that Atlanta city schools were desegregated. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the speakers at Dobbs's funeral, and Thurgood Marshall, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and future Supreme Court justice, served as a pallbearer. Dobbs received a lasting tribute on January 10, 1994, when his grandson, Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, changed the name of Houston Street to John Wesley Dobbs Avenue.

Suggested Reading

Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Scribner, 1996).

Matthew Bailey, Georgia College and State University

Published 8/26/2005

Extending

Sweet Auburn

Originally called Wheat Street, the road was renamed in 1893 at the request of white petitioners who believed Auburn Avenue had a more cosmopolitan sound. During the next two decades, as restrictive Jim Crow legislation was codified into law, the city's African American population became confined to the area between downtown and Atlanta University and to neighborhoods on the city's east side, known today as the Old Fourth Ward. It was during this period that Auburn Avenue first achieved prominence as a commercial corridor and became home to the city's emerging black middle class.

Although

Atlanta Life Insurance

composed mostly of small businesses, Auburn Avenue was also home to what historian Gary Pomerantz describes as Atlanta's "three-legged stool of black finance." The first of these institutions was founded by Alonzo Herndon, a former slave who became the city's first black millionaire. After earning a modest fortune as the owner of a barbershop on Peachtree Street, Herndon founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company in 1905. Six years later an enterprising Texan named Heman Perry formed a second black insurance company, Standard Life. Citizens Trust Bank formed the third leg of the city's black financial stool, extending credit to black homeowners and entrepreneurs who were underserved by the city's white lending institutions. Because Auburn Avenue's financial institutions amounted to a consolidation of African American wealth unique for its time, black Atlantans referred to the street as "Sweet Auburn." Coined by John Wesley Dobbs, a civic leader and the neighborhood's unofficial "mayor," the name reflected the avenue's prominence as a national center of black commerce.

But

Royal Peacock

Civil Rights Era and Beyond

Ironically,

Martin Luther King Jr. Birthplace

Auburn's civic activism led to its undoing. As the NAACP and local voting-rights organizations, from their Sweet Auburn offices, lobbied state and local governments for an end to segregation, and as native son Martin Luther King Jr., who was born at 501 Auburn Avenue, led the crusade for civil rights before a national audience, the street began its steep decline. With the legal barriers to integration removed, many Auburn shopkeepers moved their businesses to other areas of the city, and residents began migrating to Atlanta's west side. At the same time the street was bisected by the construction of the downtown connector. Once vital and vibrant, the community's fabric began to tear as Sweet Auburn fell victim to disinvestment and neglect. "It turned into a decaying memorial to a bygone era," observes Gary Pomerantz, "a necessary though regrettable price for freedom."

Despite repeated attempts at renewal, Auburn Avenue remains a model of urban blight. A revitalization plan undertaken by Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson in the 1970s failed to stem the neighborhood's decline, and his successors have not made a sustained commitment to the neighborhood's welfare. Auburn's designation as a national historic landmark in 1976 and the construction of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in the 1980s encouraged hopes that the neighborhood might be revitalized, but those expectations have gone unfulfilled. While these sites are among the largest attractions in the city, few of the more than 600,000 annual visitors (as of 2005) have ventured farther down the block for dining or entertainment.

Past

Sweet Auburn Festival

failures notwithstanding, residents and advocates have not given up on Sweet Auburn. In 1984 civil rights leader Hosea Williams founded the Sweet Auburn Heritage Festival, which offers entertainment, food, art, and children's activities along Auburn Avenue each year. As of 2006, a $45 million redevelopment plan to create thousands of square feet of retail space and hundreds of condominiums, spearheaded by the historic Big Bethel AME Church, suggests that the community is poised for renewal. Moreover, the area has been designated a "tax allocation district," meaning that potential developments would enjoy municipal financial support. While Sweet Auburn's future remains uncertain, its supporters believe that it is prepared to regain its former glory.

Suggested Reading

Clifford M. Kuhn, Harlon E. Joye, and E. Bernard West, Living Atlanta: An Oral History of the City, 1914-1948 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).

Carole Merritt, The Herndons: An Atlanta Family (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002).

Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Scribner, 1996).

Edward A. Hatfield, New Georgia Encyclopedia

Published 6/2/2006

Credit for content : http://www.pbs.org/blackpress/

In 1905, after extrordinary success in barber shops and real estate, Alonzo Herndon was approached by two prominent black church pastors. One of them, Rev. Peter Bryant of Wheat Street Baptist Church, had recently formed the Atlanta Benevolent & Protective Association, and was in dire need of capital. Herndon agreed to buy the small benevolent association for $140 and, with the acquisition and reorganization of two other companies in September of that year, formed the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association, later to be the Atlanta Life Insurance Company

Through one acquisition and merger after another, Atlanta Life grew. The clients of small, failing companies, who were in jeopardy of losing their policies, were given reprieves when taken over by Atlanta Life. Confidence in the company and in Herndon's ability and judgment grew. An editor of the Atlanta Independent newspaper, wrote, "When people buy a policy in Atlanta Life they are buying Alonzo Herndon."

In 1920, the company moved to 148 Auburn Avenue and in 1980 moved from these aging facilities to a new corporate structure next door.

Upon Mr. Herndon's death in 1927, his son, Norris B. Herndon, became president, leading the company to unprecedented growth following the Depression. The tradition of business excellence and community service continued with Jesse Hill, Jr. (Butler Street was renamed after him in 2002), who succeeded to the presidency in 1973 and was sustained by Don Royster, Sr., who in 1992 became the company's fourth president. Charles Cornelius, becoming the fifth president and chief executive officer in June 1996, carries on the company's proud legacy.

Credit for several direct quotes within the above information (also the present day website of Atlanta Life Insurance Co.): http://www.atlantalife.com/ .