A Darktown Law Suit

In the late nineteenth century, American printing firm Currier & Ives (1834–1907) produced Darktown, a lithographic series chronicling a fictional African American community. From the mid-1870s into the 1890s, Currier & Ives commissioned various illustrators to produce more than one hundred scenes of this fictional, segregated community that reinforced pervasive negative stereotypes about black Americans—namely newly emancipated slaves—through caricature and inscriptions written in a highly exaggerated vernacular. The Darktown series captured nativist and racist attitudes that persisted after Reconstruction (1865–77), the period following the Civil War in which former Confederate states were reintegrated into the United States. As states and localities in the American South began to implement Jim Crow laws, a white, middle-class audience collected these prints. Though Currier & Ives is most often associated with idyllic winter scenes and depictions of horseracing featuring white participants, the dehumanizing imagery of Darktown was among the firm’s most popular—thousands of restrikes from the original lithographic stones were issued by other publishers after the company liquidated in 1907. The foundation of the educational philosophy at the Clark is the working definition of art as an expression or reflection of human experience and imagination. We believe that engaging with art encourages important conversations about a variety of topics, even difficult ones. These offensive and uncomfortable images can open a meaningful dialogue about the histories of individual, institutional, and structural racism in the United States and the forms of persistent racism in the contemporary world. Learning about Darktown offers an opportunity to come to new understandings of the legacy of our nation’s racist past and models the unique value of teaching with art.

Image Caption

After John Cameron, A Darktown Law Suit, 1886, Hand-colored lithograph. Clark Art Institute, gift of Mary Carswell, 2017.11.22