Visitors to Auburn Avenue often pause at the 1895 Queen Anne house where Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929. A new history feature from Capital B Atlanta argues that the walk should not stop there, and points visitors farther down the avenue to a three-story building whose rooms once held the money, paperwork and airwaves that kept the Civil Rights Movement running: the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge.
The building's story starts in the Depression. The Prince Hall Masons, led by Grand Master John Wesley Dobbs, spent years planning and raising funds before laying the cornerstone in September 1937. Dues and collections covered a reported cost of roughly $35,000, and when the doors opened in 1940, tenants were already lined up to move into what was called "The Jewel of Auburn Avenue."
What filled those rooms was a cross-section of Black Atlanta's working life. North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Co. leased ground-floor space, where families brought in small weekly premiums so a death would not also become a financial disaster. The Atlanta Civic and Political League met in the building and registered thousands of Black voters through the 1930s and 1940s. On the Hilliard Street side, Lillie Bozeman opened a Madam C.J. Walker beauty school and salon in 1940, and fraternal lodges upstairs kept benefit records for members, with the Masonic Relief Association logging payments over decades.
The lodge also served a rare civic purpose. Because it was not tied to a single church or profession, it became one of the few non-denominational places where Black Atlantans from different congregations and neighborhoods could meet. Labor leaders from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters met there in 1944, in a building where political groups and business offices used the same stairs.
In 1949, Jesse B. Blayton Sr. bought radio station WERD, the first Black-owned radio station in the United States, and its broadcasts carried business news and meeting notices into homes across the city. A 1955 expansion added storefronts along Hilliard Street plus more office space, bringing in a barber shop, a dentist and new meeting rooms. More than 2,000 people came to the open house when that work wrapped up.
The building's best-known chapter followed. Ministers formed what became the Southern Christian Leadership Conference nearby in 1957, and in 1963 the organization moved its headquarters into the first floor and basement of the original building. Staff grew from a handful as campaigns spread across the South, and King's office and Andrew Young's both sat on that floor. With WERD still on the air upstairs, news from a meeting downstairs could reach listeners the same day, and Capital B recounts that King would lower a microphone out an open window to get his messages on the air.
The feature's central argument is that this mix was no accident. Campaigns ran on practical costs: gas and car pools for boycotts, cash for bail, paper and ink for flyers, and pay for the people doing the organizing. The insurance office, salon, radio station and lodges under one roof formed an economic base that kept that work going between the speeches and marches Sweet Auburn is usually remembered for.
Over the decades the lodge fell into disrepair before a restoration brought it back, and the building reopened in February 2026. The restoration is covered in our earlier report. For anyone planning a visit, the feature makes a good companion to a stop at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park: see the birth home, then keep walking down Auburn to the lodge, where the economic side of the movement was run out of one corridor of offices.
Original reporting by Ann Hill Bond for Capital B Atlanta.
