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]
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]