The Sweet Auburn Historic District is a historic African-American neighborhood along Auburn Avenue (originally named Wheat Street) in Atlanta, Georgia. The name Sweet Auburn was coined by John Wesley Dobbs, referring to the "richest Negro street in the world". In addition to Auburn Avenue itself, the surrounding neighborhood, also called Sweet Auburn is one of 242 officially recognized neighborhoods of Atlanta. It is bounded by: Freedom Parkway and the Old Fourth Ward (formerly the separate Bedford Pine neighborhood) on the north; Boulevard and the Old Fourth Ward on the east; the MARTA East-West line and the Oakland and Grant Park neighborhoods on the south; and the Downtown Connector and Downtown Atlanta on the west.

The rise of Auburn Avenue as "the" black business district in Atlanta was to a great extent an outcome of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. Prior to this time black businesses operated largely in downtown Atlanta — a business district integrated as far as business ownership was concerned. But competition between working-class whites and black for jobs and housing gave rise to fears and tensions.

Black businesses started to move from previously integrated business district downtown to the relative safety of the area around the Atlanta University Center west of downtown, and to Auburn Avenue in the Fourth Ward east of downtown. "Sweet" Auburn Avenue became home to Alonzo Herndon's Atlanta Mutual, the city's first black-owned life insurance company, and to a celebrated concentration of black businesses, newspapers, churches, and nightclubs. In 1956, Fortune magazine called Sweet Auburn "the richest Negro street in the world", a phrase originally coined by civil rights leader John Wesley Dobbs. Sweet Auburn and Atlanta's elite black colleges formed the nexus of a prosperous black middle class and upper class which arose despite of enormous social and legal obstacles.

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