Darktown was an African-American neighborhood in

Atlanta, Georgia Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...

. It stretched from

Peachtree Street Peachtree Street is one of several major streets running through the city of Atlanta. Beginning at Five Points (Atlanta), Five Points in downtown Atlanta, it runs North through Midtown Atlanta, Midtown; a few blocks after entering into Buckhead ...

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 Downtown Atlanta is the central business district of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The larger of the city's two other commercial districts ( Midtown and Buckhead), it is the location of many corporate and regional headquarters; city, county, s ...

and the

Sweet Auburn Sweetness is a basic taste most commonly perceived when eating foods rich in sugars. Sweet tastes are generally regarded as pleasurable. In addition to sugars like sucrose, many other chemical compounds are sweet, including aldehydes, ketones, ...

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 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 Av ...

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

{{Coord, 33.760592, -84.381572, display=title Former shantytowns and slums in Atlanta African-American history in Atlanta Old Fourth Ward