Inside a Jim Crow asylum

In March 1911, twelve Black men were brought to a forest in Maryland. Under supervision, they cleared land and laid foundations for what would become the Crownsville Hospital, a segregated mental asylum for black patients. These twelve men would also become the hospital’s first patients. Speaking to Elinor Evans, journalist and author Antonia Hylton shares the story of one of the last segregated asylums in the United States of America, and what it can tell us about the nation’s history of racial integration and civil rights.

Antonia Hylton is the author of Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (Footnote Press, 2024).