Darktown
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
[edit]- ↑ 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 February 15, 2021.
- ↑ Le Beau, Bryan (Spring 2000). "African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The darktown series". Journal of American and Comparative Cultures. ProQuest 200582642. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
- ↑ Benti, Diann (October 15, 2019). "Lucrative Racism". AHPCS. Retrieved February 15, 2021.
- ↑ Kartheus, Wiebke (April 7, 2019). ""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 February 15, 2021.
- ↑ The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser