Darktown Comics
Darktown Comics is a series of Currier and Ives prints first produced in the 1870s that depicted racist vignettes ostensibly portraying a Black American town.
[1]: 62 Currier and Ives, because they were targeting a middle-class American customer, inadvertently created a "pictorial record" of values in the United States in the 19th century.
[2] Albert Baragwanath said the body of work "remains a true documentation of the latter half of the nineteenth century -- a rich pageant interpreted with the morality and prejudice of the day.
[2] According to J. Michael Martinez, "The central message was clear: Negroes were incapable of performing even the simplest of tasks or engaging in ordinary social intercourse without lapsing into idiocy or violence.
[1]: 63 [2] For example, a common Currier & Ives print subject is fine horses and elegant horsemanship; in the Darktown Comics, Black people are shown riding mules, donkeys, and "broken-down nags".
[2] Other series show Black people playing popular sports and games or hunting and fishing or attending the opera or performing jobs, all incompetently.
[9][12]: 22 According to the Smithsonian,[9] They drew on a broad visual vocabulary of anti-black racist tropes that had developed over the 19th century, derogatory signifiers that would have been understood and shared by their popular audience, who created a demand for similar imagery in numerous other commercial and decorative objects of the time.
Cameron and Worth often set hapless black figures in traditionally white roles, such as firefighting, and the ridiculous failures they depicted helped to reinforce entrenched racial and social hierarchies, as well as to perpetuate the notions of heroism and leadership as white male prerogatives in the period after Reconstruction.Worth's "more obvious exaggerations" include portraying Black people with "big mouths, large feet and hands, and sloping foreheads (meant to indicate limited intelligence)".
[6] According to Martinez,[6] The first panel showed blacks engaged in some common activity -- playing sports, arguing politics, driving a team of horses, attending a party, and so forth.
The central message was clear: Negroes were incapable of performing even the simplest of common tasks or engaging in ordinary social intercourse without lapsing into idiocy or violence.Currier & Ives were particularly known for their romanticized depictions of firefighters.
[2] 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.
[10] 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.
