Imagining Residential Segregation before the Ghetto: Representations of Black Urban Space and Mobility in the “Darktown” Comics, 1877-1900

Abstract

Examining Currier and Ives’s immensely popular and racist lithographic print series, the “Darktown” comics, from 1877 to 1900, this article argues that the prints represented homogeneous black urban space as commonplace, natural, and correct despite the fact that extensive residential racial segregation was not the reality in any U.S. cities during the period. In doing so, the images both reflected growing white desires for segregation and constituted one site where Americans encountered, and potentially acquired, ideas about segregation. By demonstrating that images of racial segregation circulated via the Darktown comics prior to advent of ghettoization, this article addresses a significant gap in the historical scholarship on U.S. racial residential segregation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as this scholarship has overlooked popular culture as a site where ideas about segregation appeared and played out.