In “Madness,” the journalist Antonia Hylton explores the hidden history of Crownsville Hospital, and America’s continuing failure to care for Black minds.
MADNESS: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, by Antonia Hylton
The United States has a long and troubled history of manipulating psychology to control Black Americans, quell resistance, rationalize unpaid labor and justify cruelty.
At the depths of chattel slavery, white physicians argued that Black people were immune to mental illness, kept emotionally healthy by the kindness of their enslavers and the fresh air and exercise provided by working in the fields. As growing numbers of enslaved people attempted to escape, this itself was classified as a mental illness, “drapetomania.” Dr. Samuel Cartwright, a Southern “expert” in Negro medicine, prescribed one of the cures as “whipping the devil out of them.”
In the decades following the prohibition of slavery, the United States found another way to use psychology to control Black Americans — and squeeze out more free labor. As detailed in the journalist Antonia Hylton’s fascinating “Madness,” the “feeble-minded” Blacks were rounded up and placed in asylums where they were put to work as indentured servants.