Darktown

{{Short description|Neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia}}

{{other uses|Darktown (disambiguation)}}

{{Use mdy dates|date=February 2025}}

{{Use American English|date=January 2025}}

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.[https://books.google.com/books?id=tKsZr8Jte-MC Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary By Stephen Calt, p.69] 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".[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]

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.{{Cite web|title=Lithograph, "The Darktown Fire Brigade: Under Full Steam"|url=https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1364281|access-date=2021-02-15|website=National Museum of American History|language=en}}{{Cite web|last=Le Beau|first=Bryan|date=Spring 2000|title=African Americans in Currier and Ives's America: The darktown series|url=https://www.proquest.com/docview/200582642|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2021-02-15|website=Journal of American and Comparative Cultures|id={{ProQuest|200582642}} }}{{Cite web|last=Benti|first=Diann|date=2019-10-15|title=Lucrative Racism|url=https://ahpcs.org/2019/10/lucrative-racism/|access-date=2021-02-15|website=AHPCS}}{{Cite web|last=Kartheus|first=Wiebke|date=2019-04-07|title="Let the World Know You Are Alive": May Alcott Nieriker and Louisa May Alcott Confront Nineteenth-Century Ideas about Women's Genius|url=http://www.asjournal.org/66-2019/let-the-world-know-you-are-alive-may-alcott-nieriker-and-louisa-may-alcott-confront-nineteenth-century-ideas-about-womens-genius/|access-date=2021-02-15|website=American Studies Journal|language=en-US}}

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

[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]