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Grand football match--darktown against Blackville: a kick off – Antique Print

Grand football match--darktown against Blackville: a kick off, New York : Published by Currier & Ives, c1888. — antique lithograph
Grand football match--darktown against Blackville: a kick off, New York : Published by Currier & Ives, c1888.. Antique lithograph from the Historic Print Archive collection.

(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)

Description

Few images capture their era like this antique lithograph of Grand football match--darktown against Blackville: a kick off. Sourced directly from the Library of Congress, it represents an authentic piece of documented history.

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Grand football match--darktown against Blackville: a kick off

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A kick-off opens this chromolithograph, in which two teams of caricatured Black figures, named Darktown and Blackville in the title, take the field for a football match. Published in New York by Currier & Ives around 1888, it belongs to the firm's Darktown comics, a series of racist caricatures that mocked Black Americans through exaggerated features, dialect and slapstick. Football was still a young sport in the United States in the late 1880s, so the match works less as a record of play than as a vehicle for ridicule. Viewers today can read such prints as evidence of the demeaning stereotypes that circulated widely in popular print of the period.

Created / publishedNew York : Published by Currier & Ives, c1888.
Medium1 print : chromolithograph.
Genrec1983
NotesCaricature issued as part of the Darktown comics" series. Currier & Ives : a catalogue raisonné / compiled by Gale Research. Detroit
SourceLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Original scan1,536 × 1,050 px · prints to 5 × 4 in at 300 dpi
ReferenceAMZ-SOTP-HPA-174590

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