Darktown Explained

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]

Notes and References

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=tKsZr8Jte-MC Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary By Stephen Calt, p.69
2. https://books.google.com/books?id=hZYGqOZbWcoC The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser
3. Web site: Lithograph, "The Darktown Fire Brigade: Under Full Steam". 2021-02-15. National Museum of American History. en.
4. Web site: Le Beau. Bryan. Spring 2000. African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The darktown series. 2021-02-15. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures.
5. Web site: Benti. Diann. 2019-10-15. Lucrative Racism. 2021-02-15. AHPCS.
6. Web site: 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. 2021-02-15. American Studies Journal. en-US.
7. https://books.google.com/books?id=hZYGqOZbWcoC The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser