Anna Varney

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be more likely to die there than find their way home. The laborers who had toiled over the grounds were marched inside the buildings, into rooms they had hammered into place, and admitted as the very first patients. But that would not mark the end of their days of work. In addition to planting and harvesting crops on the Crownsville campus, the patients “were taken in motor trucks to adjoining farms within a radius of ten miles,” where they “gathered the crops for the farmers who were without help.” The twenty-eighth Lunacy Commission report boasted about how useful it was to have a captive ...more
Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
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