Did you know that Black patients of the segregated Crownsville asylum outside Baltimore, Maryland, were FORCED to build the hospital from the ground up? Journalist Antonia Hylton unpacks this horrific mistreatment of Black people with mental illnesses in her book Madness!
In March 1911, the segregated Crownsville asylum opened outside Baltimore, Maryland, admitting only Black patients.
It was the first to house Black people in the state, but when they arrived, their main role wasn’t to get support—it was to build the asylum. The combination of ableism and sanism—harmful beliefs about the nature and treatment of mental illness—with anti-Black racism in the Jim Crow South all but ensured that Black patients were treated worse than white ones held in other asylums throughout the state.
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