Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

Patients of all backgrounds were given tasks, asked to clean or make crafts, and promised that work could alleviate mental distress. But what was about to happen in Maryland was unlike anything ever recorded in the country. It would be the first and only asylum in the state, and likely the nation, to force its patients to build their own hospital from the ground up. Black Marylanders would have to earn their access to healthcare through hard labor and a return to the antebellum social order.

“It still hurts the same way after all the years,” he told me. “But talking to you is helping me. It feels good to revisit. Isn’t that what you want? I don’t want it to not hurt anymore. It means I’ve forgotten something.”

When I asked her how she processed all of this, Sonia told me that she wouldn’t choose a different life for herself even if she could. “The very thing that I thought would stop me was the very thing that propelled me. Because once I dealt with that, the stumbling blocks were out of the way. And I felt free.”