Darktown

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Darktown was an African-American neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. It stretched from Peachtree Street and Collins Street (now Courtland Street), past Butler Ave. (now Jesse Hill Jr. Ave.) to Jackson Street. [1] It referred to the blocks above Auburn Avenue in what is now Downtown Atlanta and the Sweet Auburn neighborhood. Darktown was characterized in the 1930s as a "hell-hole of squalor, degradation, sickness, crime and misery". [2]

It is the setting for Thomas Mullen's 2016 novel Darktown .

The term "darktown" was also used generically in Atlanta and the rest of the South to refer to African-American districts. Currier and Ives produced a series of popular racist-caricature lithographs under the title Darktown Comics, ostensibly set in a Black town. [3] [4] [5] [6]

It is used as such in the title of the famous song Darktown Strutters' Ball and 1899 Charles Hale song At a Darktown Cakewalk. [7]

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Darktown Comics is a series of Currier and Ives prints first produced in the 1870s that depicted racist vignettes ostensibly portraying a Black American town. It was a perennial bestseller for the New York-based firm, with some prints selling 73,000 copies via pushcarts and country stores, and all of them becoming bestsellers. The series represented one-third of Currier and Ives' production by 1884.

References

  1. Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary By Stephen Calt, p.69
  2. The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser
  3. "Lithograph, "The Darktown Fire Brigade: Under Full Steam"". National Museum of American History. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  4. Le Beau, Bryan (Spring 2000). "African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The darktown series". Journal of American and Comparative Cultures . Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  5. Benti, Diann (2019-10-15). "Lucrative Racism". AHPCS. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  6. Kartheus, Wiebke (2019-04-07). ""Let the World Know You Are Alive": May Alcott Nieriker and Louisa May Alcott Confront Nineteenth-Century Ideas about Women's Genius". American Studies Journal. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
  7. The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser

33°45′38″N84°22′54″W / 33.760592°N 84.381572°W / 33.760592; -84.381572