A racist satire of an African American fire brigade

Several grotesquely-caricatured African American fireman lounge around their tender smoking pipes, joined by locals. Some of the pipes have ornately-carved bowls. Behind a building also smokes. The 'Darktown Comics' began in the early 1870s, lampooning Black Americans as lazy and incompetent, becoming a very lucrative series. Between 1884 and 1891 sixteen prints related to the Darktown fire brigade: these were particularly popular so, when Currier & Ives shut down operations in 1907, New York City printer Joseph Koehler purchased the lithographic stones and published reprints for several more years.