Background
The Darktown Comics "drew heavily" from earlier representations in the ''Depictions
The Darktown Comics consists of 100 to 200 racist prints "ridiculing African Americans" created and produced between the 1870s and the 1890s. The series depicts Black Americans as "a kinky-haired, thick-lipped, wide-eyed, simian creature that could not even pretend to live like white Americans." Bryan Le Beau calls this "the position to which most late nineteenth-century Americans were retreating". Often the series presents Blacks as attempting and failing, in scenarios intended to be humorous, to "rise above their station" in imitation of whites. For example, a common Currier & Ives print subject is fine horses and elegant horsemanship; in the Darktown Comics, Blacks are shown riding mules, donkeys, and "broken-down nags". Other series show Blacks playing popular sports and games or hunting and fishing or attending the opera or performing jobs, all incompetently. Black women are depicted with "huge feet...stuffed into delicate shoes"; the lithographs ridicule the idea that Black women can be beautiful, graceful, or stylish. In the "A Darktown Lawn Party" duo, a group of Blacks is depicted engaging in an elegant lawn party, an entertainment popular at the time, under a tree, oblivious to a bull pawing the turf visible in the distance, in the first vignette. In the second, the bull has charged, and the lawn party is in disarray; the implication being that in an attempt to imitate whites, Blacks are too stupid to notice they're having their party in a field that contains a bull. The lithographs represent Black Americans "as racist caricatures and ugly stereotypes" showing Blacks as "backward, inept, and unable to adapt", according to the Smithsonian. The artists include John Cameron and Thomas Worth. According to the Smithsonian, Worth's "more obvious exaggerations" include portraying Blacks with "big mouths, large feet and hands, and sloping foreheads (meant to indicate limited intelligence)". Cameron reworked the Worth drawings before they were lithographed; notes to Cameron from one of the partners on Worth's original drawings include instructions to "let the woman's foot come between the mule's forefoot so as to show his brace against here better. The child is meant to be wrapped up in a mattress" on the Worth drawing for "A Mule Team on an Up Grade." J. Michael Martinez in his 2016 ''A Long Dark Night'', described the prints as "among the earliest and most popular series of sketches depicting Negroes in the 1880s and 1890s" with sets of "before-and-after scene depicting the buffoonery of Negroes". According to Martinez,Themes
Firefighting
Currier & Ives were particularly known for their romanticized depictions of firefighters. According to Le Beau their lithographs of Black firefighters are "not so romanticized". Their depictions of Black firefighters, which consisted of 16 separate prints produced between 1884 and 1891 when many cities were appointing their first Black firefighters, were entitled The Darktown Fire Brigade and The Darktown Hook and Ladder Corps. Black firefighters were depicted using absurd homemade equipment, and again incompetently. Some in the series "seem to burlesque" more serious Currier & Ives prints on the same topic, according to Harry Peters.Marriage and courting
Currier and Ives published many lithographs "extolling the virtues of marriage and virtuous courting". According to Le Beau, "Black courting and marriage, as seen through Currier and Ives, was a different experience." As with many of the two-scene vignettes, Blacks who attempt to engage in such normal behavior as courting and marrying often end in chaos or comic scenes.Watermelons and banjos
Common themes in Darktown Comics are watermelons and banjos.Children
Black children are generally portrayed in Darktown Comics as "mischievous and out of their parents' control, showing no respect for their elders."Blackness as dirtiness
The two-part "Cause and effect", noted by Le Beau as "particularly insensitive, even vicious", portrays an elderly Black man as instructing a young Black child to stay away from soap because it will "wash all de butiful brack outen you." The child ignores him and washes with the soap, leaving his hands and face bleached white, to the dismay of both.Popularity
The Darktown Comics series was perennially among the bestselling of Currier & Ives' over 7000 lithographs, with at least one selling 73,000 copies via pushcarts and in shops and country stores. According to J. Michael Martinez, every one of the series was a bestseller. The Thomas Worth lithographs, including the Darktown Comics, were "as popular and profitable as any prints the firm produced." The series represented one-third of Currier & Ives' production by 1884. TheProduction by others
In the 1880s, an English ceramics manufacturer produced two of the Darktown series, "A Mule Train on an Up Grade" and "A Mule Train on a Down Grade", on mugs. In 1907 Currier & Ives ceased operations. The lithograph stones were "sold by the pound", according to the American Historical Print Collectors Society. Most of the lithograph stones were ground down, but the Darktown Comics were "just too lucrative" to destroy and were purchased to make restrikes by Joseph Koehler, a New York printer. Koehler reproduced the prints for several years. In London the firm of S. Lipschitz and Son created restrikes.Collectibility
As of 1996 the lithographs were among the most collectible of Currier & Ives' production.References
{{Reflist Lithographs Anti-black racism in the United States Race-related controversies in comics Race-related controversies in the United States Cartoon controversies Caricature Black people in art