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. It was a perennial bestseller for the New York-based firm, with some prints selling 73,000 copies via pushcarts and country stores, and all of them becoming bestsellers. The series represented one-third of Currier and Ives' production by 1884. Background The Darktown Comics "drew heavily" from earlier representations in the Harper's Weekly Blackville series by Sol Eytinge. 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. Prominent collector Harry Peters called the lithographs "mirrors of the national taste, weather vanes of popular opinion, reflectors of American attitudes". 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." According to Baragwanath, of the approximately 500 "comic prints" produced by Currier and Ives, "more than half of these were the so-called Darktown Comics who humor lay in gross burlesque." According to Marcy Sacks of Albion College, the Darktown representations