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]
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.
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