Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,956

This is the grave of John Wesley Dobbs.

Born in 1882 in Atlanta, Dobbs grew up in the rural areas outside of that city, around modern Marietta. Like much of that class, he was a relatively light-skinned man, as slaveowner rape of his ancestors was common on both sides and then the colorism of the post-emancipation world led to the descendants of these assaults marrying each other, not that it protected them from the horrors of Jim Crow. Dobbs was born as Jim Crow was descending and protecting his community from it would be central to his entire life.

Dobbs got into Morehouse College but he was unable to finish due to the lack of funding. He had hoped to work in a drugstore to support himself, but that never quite worked out as he had hoped. He dropped out and became a clerk in the Rail Post Office, which handled postal service along the train lines that much of the mail traveled. Federal posts were always core to the existence of the Black middle class. Whether Trump’s war on the federal government is explicitly meant to undermine Black employment or it’s just a coincidence that he is no doubt happy about, this is what is happening. Dobbs would become one of the most powerful and important people in Black Atlanta for decades, but he held onto the post office job for the next 32 years because nothing else paid.

Dobbs married Irene Thompson in 1906. She was from the city’s Black elite and he had enough money by this time to buy a house from a Jewish family fleeing the neighborhood as Black people were moving in and of course you can’t have an integrated neighborhood or anything like that. They would have six children, all daughters. One was Mattiwilda Dobbs, the legendary opera singer who desegregated a lot of stages. She is buried right next to her parents and you can see the corner of her grave in this photo.

The early twentieth century was a great era of fraternal organizations and other volunteer-based organizations that shaped society, regardless of race. So it’s not surprising that Dobbs would base in rise in the Black community on the Masons. He became a member of the Prince Hall Masons in 1911; Hall created the Black Masons. He would rise and become its Grand Master in 1932.

Dobbs was also a rock-ribbed Republican. The Republican Party was not really the Party of Lincoln any longer. But if you were in the South, the Democrats were so overwhelmingly white supremacist that the Republicans were what there was. Now, despite the general stereotype, there was actually pretty large pockets of Black voting in the South during Jim Crow. It was never enough to seriously impact political outcomes, but even in states like Alabama and Mississippi in the 1950s, the Black voting rate was about 20 percent. That was located primarily in the cities. He organized the Atlanta Civic and Political Club to push Black political engagement in the early 30s.

Dobbs engaged in a big time voting drive in 1936 to register 10,000 new Black people in Georgia to vote; despite the fact that Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal was slowly bringing jobs to Black folks, it was still deeply tied to the white supremacist structure in the South. He was also involved in the NAACP’s attempts to start chipping away at the legal restrictions on Black voting that began winning pretty consistently by the second half of the 1930s. In fact though, Dobbs was often quite critical of the NAACP for being what he saw as a white-run organization.

Another interesting thing about Dobbs’ politics is that the Masons were central to civil rights movements in many cities. Being involved in civil rights meant being accused of being a communist in postwar America. Many chapters engaged in their own red-baiting, forcing members to take noncommunist pledges and things like this. Dobbs had no interest in that nonsense and refused to apply it to his chapter in Atlanta. Dobbs was by all accounts an astounding orator as well and that certainly did not hurt his standing in the community.

By 1946, Dobbs had led campaigns that had registered 20,000 Black Atlantans. This had a real impact. He forced Atlanta mayor William Hartsfield to desegregate the Atlanta police department in 1948. That hardly meant good policing or that Black cops would be patrolling white communities. Far from it, but at least there would be Black cops in Black neighborhoods. It wasn’t just one officer to get it started either. It was eight officers.

Auburn Avenue was the center of Black life in Atlanta, at least until the interstate was sent right through it in the 1960s. The interstate systems were almost always driven through Black neighborhoods because they would not have as much political ability to resist the destruction of their communities. In any case, another major victory for Dobbs was getting street lighting along Auburn Avenue in 1949, the first street in a Black neighborhood to have it. Dobbs is said to have coined the term “Sweet Auburn” to describe this vibrant social and commercial center of Black Atlanta.

Dobbs also was involved in the growing attempts to expose the horrors of Jim Crow to northern liberal audiences. The famous of these was Black Like Me, which I know I read in school. Dobbs wasn’t involved in that scheme of a white reporter in blackface, but he was involved with Ray Sprigle, who was a Pittsburgh-based reporter who was passing as a Black man traveling in the Jim Crow South. Sprigle was evidently a dark-skinned white because he simply said he was a light-skinned Black man and traveled on Jim Crow cars. He and Dobbs traveled around for a month, with Dobbs claiming it was his cousin from Pittsburgh. Sprigle then wrote a 21 part newspaper series called “I Was a Negro in the South for 30 Days.” This was syndicated throughout the North and caused widespread outrage, putting more pressure on the white South. There’s no way such a thing would work today, as northern whites are probably less indifferent to racism now than in 1948. This became a book called In the Land of Jim Crow. Dobbs was not publicly acknowledged to be part of this until the 1990s and for good reason, as he risked being lynched for something like this, no matter who he was.

In short, Dobbs was the kind of figure who laid the groundwork for Atlanta being the home of the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King, Jr. There were plenty of other figures involved in this, including MLK Sr. But Dobbs was quite possibly the single most important. Dobbs came to know King. Of course he knew him as a boy and then again as a civil rights leader.

In fact, Dobbs died on August 30, 1961, at the age of 79. This is the same week that Atlanta schools were officially desegregated, though thanks to whites wanting the “best” education for their children, schools were never really too desegregated in Atlanta or anywhere else for that matter.

John Wesley Dobbs is buried in South View Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

If you would like this series to visit other early 20th century civil rights leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Louis Austin is in Durham, North Carolina and Denzil Carty is in Minneapolis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.