Darktown
Darktown was an African-American neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia. It stretched from Peachtree Street and Collins Street, past Butler Ave. to Jackson Street. 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".
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.
