Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🌑 A fictional place ⚠️ An offensive term 📚 A crime novel
Darktown

Darktown

1 9.9
An old offensive name for Black neighborhoods that should not be used
  • proper noun
  • Slur
: [término ofensivo para barrio de personas negras]
  • In the old stories, they depicted a place known as Darktown filled with mystery and danger.

Examples

  • I think his widow's still in their place in Darktown, though.

    Lone Star (1996)

  • I think his widow's still in their place in Darktown, though.

    Fiction book (1996)

  • They call you the mayor of Darktown.

    Lone Star (1996)

  • Thaddeus Marcus Adams of Pratt Street in the city of Baltimore had said something that a white lady considered flippant, and for this, he had been beaten to within an inch of his life and strung up on a streetlamp at the border of what everyone back then called Darktown.

    Fiction book (2001)

  • The term Darktown was used offensively to refer to a Black neighborhood in historical contexts.

  • The book Darktown explores the lives of African American police officers in the segregated South.

Surface Forms

Darktown main

Morphology

Darktown = dark + town (opaque) = dark + town

Although formed from 'dark' + 'town', the historical racist usage referring specifically to Black neighborhoods is a culturally specific, non-literal meaning not derivable from the components alone.

Etymology

Darktown was once used as an offensive label for Black neighborhoods in the United States. It used dark ('no light') to refer to skin color and showed racial prejudice, so do not use it.