Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

century-long belief that newfound freedom had increased the rates of insanity among Black people.

The ordinance created color lines in Maryland communities that still exist today.

We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know we will win, but I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house.

On April 13 of that year, socialites and politicians, including Governor Theodore McKeldin of Maryland, convened at the McShane Bell Foundry in Baltimore. Together they melted down all of the chains and restraints received during the campaign and turned them into a 300-pound Mental Health Bell.

Hugh Young

they were told it was a bad mood. To fix the depression, that person only needed to go outside and play or be a man. There was an unsaid expectation for that person to walk it off, as everyone else did with the things that tormented them. People with mental health challenges were people to stay away from or to pity. Rodney didn’t feel a lot of empathy for people like his aunt.

The Elkton Three

Wallace legendarily admitted that his political career took off after he focused on citizens’ fears of Black people instead of on infrastructural improvements to the state: “You know, I tried to talk about good roads and good

schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.”

“the transition from ‘democracy in the foxhole’ to discrimination in the ghetto at home.”

From Asylum to Prison,

You are special. You deserve love. There is more to your story than your current circumstance. On

why it was that she had found the other side of grief as Calvin slipped further into sorrow. “The hard thing is you see their potential, you know; you see what they can be,”

We could sit here all day long and talk about how poorly we’ve been treated as a culture. That’s not what I’m talking about. How do we not duplicate the same stuff again and again and again?”

He was a Confederate sympathizer who opposed slavery, not because he thought Black people were equal, but because he worried it would make white people lazy. Steuart