Darktown

Neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia

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]

References

^ Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary By Stephen Calt, p.69
^ The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser
^ "Lithograph, "The Darktown Fire Brigade: Under Full Steam"". National Museum of American History. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
^ 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.
^ Benti, Diann (2019-10-15). "Lucrative Racism". AHPCS. Retrieved 2021-02-15.
^ 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.
^ The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser