Support for this podcast comes from Emory University's Goiseweta Business School.

Emory delivers top-ranked programs for working professionals including a part-time MBA,

executive MBA, and new masters in business analytics. More at Emory.biz-change.

From an Iraq war cover-up to towns ravaged by opioids to the roots of our modern immigration crisis,

embedded explores what's been sealed off and undisclosed.

NPR's original investigative podcast reveals why these stories and the people behind them

matter. Listen to the embedded podcast only from NPR.

Cotton Avenue in Macon, Georgia is a short street, it's only two blocks really.

Wagon's full of cotton rolled down this avenue to the Okmoggi River nearly two centuries ago,

loading bags and bales onto the flat bottomed barges.

Short as it is, Cotton Avenue is also an emblem of our profoundly conflicted south in the 21st

century. At one end, Rosa Park Square, named for the African-American woman whose defiance of

the old south inspired the civil rights movement. At the other end of Cotton Avenue, a statue of

a defender of the old south, a Confederate soldier, he's 10 feet tall with an enormous moustache,

he's holding his rifle and looking northward over the river. So in this corner, Rosa Parks,

and in this corner, the Confederate Army. Welcome to the Deep South.

Now here's something the white planters and the slave owners who made their fortunes on Cotton

Avenue couldn't have seen coming. These few blocks would later be the center of Black Commerce in

Macon, one of the first places in the city where African-Americans built real wealth. In the early

1900s, it was known as the Black Main Street of Macon. Now why am I telling you about Macon

Georgian about Cotton Avenue? Because that's where our story begins. It's 1962 and it's where

boy meets girl where they flirt, where they go for a stroll, where they're confronted by police,

...