The Darkest Child

The Darkest Child is set in the late-1950s and early-1960s in small-town Georgia, where racism and segregation were commonplace due to the Jim Crow laws. These local and state laws legally enforced racial segregation from 1865—when enslavement was abolished—until 1968, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964), the Voting Rights Act (1956), and the Fair Housing Act (1968). Jim Crow laws limited Black citizens’ access to jobs, education, and voting.

Jim Crow laws limited where Black citizens could work and how much money they could earn, legally ensuring racial economic inequality. Jim Crow laws are explored through economic inequality in The Darkest Child, where the town’s Black residents are only allowed to work for certain low-paying employers. In the novel, only a handful of Black men are allowed to work at the local carpet mill, while the others are limited to working unstable, temporary jobs in manual labor. With Jim Crow laws in place, pay was kept low with no legal repercussions for corrupt employers.

Due to low pay, a two-income household was often necessary for Black families, though many white women didn’t work outside the home. However, the job opportunities available to Black women were even more limited than those available to Black men. Many Black women in The Darkest Child work as domestic servants for white families. The limited job opportunities and pay caps resulted in widespread economic inequality under the Jim Crow laws.

Jim Crow laws also legally enforced segregation, represented in The Darkest Child through separate movie theater sections, drinking fountains, and other public areas. Additionally, hospitals, nursing homes, parks, swimming pools, restaurants, restrooms, elevators, cemeteries, jails, and transportation systems were also segregated. Interracial marriage was illegal, and Black residents were required to live in separate neighborhoods from white residents, as seen in the segregated layout of the county in The Darkest Child. Public schools were segregated until the Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional in 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education. Although the integration of public schools was mandated on a federal level before the time of The Darkest Child, some local school districts did not immediately comply, especially in remote areas. Despite the hardship caused by these racist laws, Black citizens found ways to resist the laws and advocate for social change.