A glance at a map of Downtown Atlanta reveals a variety of streets named after African American leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. There's M.L.K. Jr. Drive, Jesse Hill Jr. Drive, Ralph David Abernathy Boulevard, John Lewis Freedom Parkway, and John Wesley Dobbs Avenue. What residents of Cobb County may not know is that the latter thoroughfare’s namesake has a strong tie to the Kennesaw and Marietta area.
John Wesley Dobbs was born on March 6, 1882, on a farm just north of Kennesaw. His grandparents and parents had all been enslaved in North Cobb before the Civil War and stayed in the area during Reconstruction. After his parents separated in 1884 and his mother moved to Savannah, John Wesley Dobbs was raised by his grandparents on their Kennesaw farm. In 1891, he moved to Savannah to live with his mother.
Dobbs was a student at the Atlanta Baptist College, now Morehouse College, and would stay in Atlanta for the rest of his life. He worked first at an Atlanta drugstore, but in 1903, he passed a civil service exam and was hired as a railway mail clerk. Dobbs worked on board a mail railroad car sorting letters as trains barreled across the southern landscape. Positions in the federal government like this were some of the most prestigious jobs available to Black Americans outside of Black communities.
In 1906, he married Irene Thompson, and they spent their honeymoon at his uncle’s farm in Kennesaw. They moved to Houston Street in Atlanta in 1909 and had six children. Over the next few decades, Dobbs became a leader in the Auburn Avenue community. An early sign of his growing importance came in 1911, when he joined the Prince Hall Masons and quickly rose through the ranks. This group was for African Americans, unlike other segregated Masonic groups.
During this period, Dobbs maintained strong connections to Kennesaw. Biographer Gary Pomerantz has noted that Dobbs saw his uncle, Jesse, at the Kennesaw Depot weekly and that the Dobbs family spent their summers at Jesse’s farm. Dobbs is also known to have visited the King’s Wigwam, an African American summer resort located just north of Kennesaw from 1915 to 1919. In a July 31, 1915, article for the Atlanta Independent, Dobbs described the resort as being “situated on one of the most ideal spots for a summer resort in Georgia.” His account described the resort’s lake boat ride as “pure, fresh, and cool air” and a bucolic atmosphere. Sadly, in 1919, the resort was permanently closed.
In 1932, Dobbs became the Grand Master of the Prince Hall Masons in Georgia, giving him even greater influence on Auburn Avenue. At the same time, Dobbs became more civically involved and pushed for greater civil rights. In 1936, he founded the Atlanta Civic and Political League and encouraged African American voter registration in a period of disfranchisement. Dobbs was an advocate for voter registration for the rest of his life, and at the time of his death, the organizations he founded supported the registration of more than 175,000 voters. Beginning in 1946, Black voters were allowed to participate in statewide primary elections, and they began to exert greater influence on Atlanta elections in the 1940s and 1950s. Dobbs emerged as the leader of this new voting bloc.
Dobbs was known as the “Unofficial Mayor of Auburn Avenue” and coined the street’s nickname, “Sweet Auburn.” In the 1940s, he worked with Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield to improve the street, leveraging his role as a community leader and the newfound power of Black voters. Thanks to Dobbs, streetlights were added to Auburn Avenue, and the City of Atlanta hired its first African American police officers. As the Civil Rights movement gained traction in the late 1950s and 1960s, Dobbs was seen as a symbol of the old-guard moderates. He played an important symbolic role in the Atlanta Sit-Ins of 1960 when he turned in his charge plate at Rich’s department store to protest segregation policies.
John Wesley Dobbs passed away on August 30, 1961. That very same day, Atlanta’s public schools were desegregated. People came from as far away as California and New York to attend his funeral, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a speaker. He's buried in Atlanta’s South View Cemetery. His daughter, Mattiwilda, was a noted opera singer, while his grandson, Maynard Jackson, was the first African American mayor of Atlanta. In 1994, Houston Street, where Dobbs lived, was renamed John Wesley Dobbs Avenue.