In 1905, Alonzo Franklin Herndon, a slave-born barber, founded what would become the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. For $140 he purchased a small self-help association known as the Atlanta Benevolent and Protective Association, which had been organized the year before by the Reverend Peter Bryant of Wheat Street Baptist Church. Subsequently acquiring two other companies, the Royal Mutual Insurance Company and the National Laborers' Protective Union, Herndon then reorganized his acquisitions as the Atlanta Mutual Insurance Association. Atlanta Mutual began operations that year on September 21. Within three months of operation, the company covered Georgia from Bainbridge to Rome, serving more than six thousand policyholders. By 1915, Atlanta Mutual had become the largest Black industrial insurance company in the lower South. In September 1922, Atlanta Mutual amended its charter, increasing its capital stock to $100,000, becoming Georgia's second Black legal reserve company, and renaming itself Atlanta Life Insurance Company. As a legal reserve company with the capability of selling all classes of insurance, Herndon's enterprise had reached its greatest milestone. By the end of 1924, the company had expanded operations to six additional states: Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas. By the time Norris Herndon, son of the founder assumed presidency of the company at his father's death on July 21, 1927, the company's assets had increased nearly one million dollars. The period of retrenchment forced upon the company by the Depression was followed, however, by the phenomenal economic growth generated by World War II. By the end of the 1940s, Atlanta Life's capitalization had doubled and the company had expanded into Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. As one of the largest Black financial institutions in the nation, Atlanta Life offered the African American community not only low cost insurance, but also a significant career alternative to teaching and the ministry. As one of the largest Black businesses in the South during the Jim Crow era, Atlanta Life assumed a leadership role in home mortgages, civil rights, and other areas of community development. The social and political changes triggered by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the economic advances of many Blacks in the 1960s and 1970s undermined what had been a captive market for Black insurance companies. Of the more than seventy-five African American insurance companies in operation in 1950, less than twenty remain in business today.

In 1973, Norris Herndon relinquished leadership of the company to Jesse Hill, Jr., under whose direction Atlanta Life continued to acquire smaller companies and to increase its assets, insurance in force, and total income. Confronting a more competitive market, however, in the later decades of the twentieth century, the company divested itself of its home insurance business in 2002, reorganized as a comprehensive financial services company, and was renamed Atlanta Life Financial Group.