Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

By the early twentieth century in Baltimore, it became illegal for a white person to move onto a street that was more than 50 percent Black and illegal for a Black person to move onto a street that was more than 50 percent white. That ordinance was the first of its kind in the nation, cementing apartheid in Baltimore and inspiring other Southern states to follow suit. The ordinance created color lines in Maryland communities that still exist today.