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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. 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".

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.

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

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″N 84°22′54″W / 33.760592°N 84.381572°W / 33.760592; -84.381572

• Former shantytowns and slums in Atlanta
• African-American history in Atlanta
• Old Fourth Ward