Antonia Hylton

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“African Americans constituted 75 percent of Maryland’s prison growth in the mid to late twentieth century, according to the Justice Policy Institute. Rates of imprisonment have begun to decline in recent years, but they continue to disproportionately harm Black communities in Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. When”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum