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]

For other uses, see Darktown (disambiguation).

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. It is used as such in the title of the famous song Darktown Strutters' Ball and 1899 Charles Hale song, At a Darktown Cakewalk. [3]

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. The separate city: Black communities in the Urban South, 1940-1968, p.130, Christopher Silver, John V. Moeser

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