What is Currier & Ives' Darktown Series

Fire Brigade.jpg

The Darktown Fire Brigade - Under Full Steam. (1887) Currier & Ives. Library of Congress, www.loc.gov.

     In the PBS American Experience documentary “The Gilded Age,” Nell Irvin Painter considers the word “gilded” in relation to the era as a “patina covering something else . . . the shiny exterior, and the rot underneath.” [1] The lithographs known as the Darktown series produced between the mid-1870s and mid-1890s by the nineteenth-century print firm Currier & Ives evoke a similar comparison. They are images of ostensible comedy masking a national tragedy—the discrimination, segregation, and murder of African Americans during the Victorian era and beyond. In these pictures black Americans are portrayed as idiotic and blundering as they attempt to assume the dress, behaviors, leisure activities, and economic positions of white Americans.

     Currier & Ives claimed that the Darktown “comics” were “pleasant and humorous designs, free from coarseness or vulgarity, being good natured hits at the popular amusements and excitements of the times.” [2] This study argues that they (the firm as well as the prints themselves) were in fact anything but innocent or inoffensive. More grave and sinister in intent, they served as a reinforcement of stereotypes, discrimination, and the white supremacist attitudes shared by the overwhelming majority of Americans during the late-nineteenth century—an era marked by Jim Crow, the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, voter suppression, and lynching. The study will provide a brief look at Currier & Ives’ portrayal in its prints of African Americans up to the Reconstruction era, discuss the pervasive racism against blacks during the last three decades of the nineteenth century in the United States, and finally, examine several of the images from the Darktown series in order to extrapolate some of more subtly devious racist and white supremacist themes. Ultimately what will be shown is that these pictures promoted violence and underpinned the white urge to stifle, contain, and check black citizens in post-Reconstruction America.

References

1. Sarah Colt, dir. American Experience. Season 30 Episode 3, “The Gilded Age.” Aired February 6, 2018, on PBS. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/gilded-age/#film_description

2. Le Beau, Currier and Ives: America Imagined, 231; Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, (New York: Random House, 2002), vii, viii.