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. 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 (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

{{Coord, 33.760592, -84.381572, display=title Former shantytowns a ...
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Darktown Comics
Darktown Comics is a series of Currier and Ives prints first produced in the 1870s that depicted racist vignettes ostensibly portraying a Black American town. It was a perennial bestseller for the New York-based firm, with some prints selling 73,000 copies via pushcarts and country stores, and all of them becoming bestsellers. The series represented one-third of Currier and Ives' production by 1884. Background The Darktown Comics "drew heavily" from earlier representations in the ''Harper's Weekly'' Blackville series by Sol Eytinge. Currier and Ives, because they were targeting a middle-class American customer, inadvertently created a "pictorial record" of values in the United States in the 19th century. Prominent collector Harry Peters called the lithographs "mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes". Albert Baragwanath said the body of work "remains a true documentation of the latter half of the nineteenth century -- ...
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