Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

The people of the Eastern Shore were proud to be “lynchtown.” At least in private.

The function of lynching was so much more than a bypassing of the justice system. It was a form of psychological terrorism. And it sent several messages. One basic message was that they had killed people like Williams and Armwood before and, if necessary, would do it again.

But the more subtle and crucial message was that they still owned Black people. That they could sever their body parts, and continue to have complete and utter dominion. They controlled their livelihoods and their prospects. They could take ownership of people seen as destitute, different, and strange.

How could you not go mad?

The staff at Crownsville leaned heavily on seclusion as a primary method for subduing patients. Patients at Crownsville were routinely left alone in dark and damp cells with little more than a thin mattress on the ground. The practice of isolating and secluding patients was well documented and, in some instances, critiqued. In 1949, a document titled “Report on the Mental Hospitals of the State of Maryland” expressed concern that recreation had still not been developed at Crownsville and that the few amusements offered to the patients came from volunteers from the community.

In those early years, less than 5 percent of patients had any sort of criminal record. So, although a small fraction of Crownsville patients entered the asylum classified as dangerous, the employees at Crownsville were alleged to be engaging in an unusual preference for confinement and seclusion.

In January 1949, after Norton had completed his tour of Crownsville, the title of his investigative series read, “Maryland’s Shame: The Worst Story Ever Told in the Sunpapers.”

When Howard Norton’s series on “Maryland’s Shame” debuted, the entire state reacted in disgust. The governor received several hundred letters and telegrams that ranged from outrage to profound sadness. Residents wrote to the paper and demanded that the legislature take action. Just one week after the series came out, lawmakers formed a special joint committee to investigate all of the state’s mental institutions. By February of the same year, then-governor William Preston Lane announced a $20 million capital improvement plan for the state hospitals, with space at Crownsville doubled.

The hospital leaders theorized that the expenditures were misguided, though predictable, given the low priority and position of the hospital. Haphazard expansions and an emphasis on custodial, rather than curative, spaces, they explained, were directly linked to the public’s opinion of Black patients “in present day culture.”

The white community surrounding Crownsville was becoming increasingly wary of what it perceived to be dangerous Black people roaming uncontrolled behind the hospital’s walls. Crownsville became increasingly isolated, and its isolation took on many forms. At its most literal, it was “cage” seclusion cells and labor that provided neither social contact nor vocational opportunity. At its most structural, it was part of a statewide effort to maintain separation of the races at any cost.

Throughout the sixties and early seventies, Maynard had grown more fearful, morbid, and conspiratorial; he was sleeping less and less. The problem was, so were many Black people at the time. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated three years earlier. The city of Detroit had burned in the long, hot summer of 1967. Police were targeting men like Cousin Maynard here and back in his hometown of Mobile. Fear was nothing out of the ordinary.

In 1966 Maynard entered the University of Alabama as a freshman, a little more than two years after George Wallace, a notorious racist and the governor of Alabama, had stood in the schoolhouse door of Foster Auditorium. Wallace put on an exaggerated performance of “states’ rights” in the face of federal agents as he blocked two young Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering to register at the university and pay their semester fees. Our family had begged and pleaded: Please, Maynard, pick any other school.

Both Maynard and my loved one became trapped in loops, unable to stop verbally repeating or redescribing their fears, frustrated that people around them didn’t appear to be acting with as much urgency. The illness was all-consuming, they could not pay much attention to almost anything beyond what the illness showed or told them. According to the authorities, around 6:30 p.m. on that evening in October, Maynard drove himself to the old Federal Building at 113 St. Joseph Street. He jumped out of the car, visibly desperate, and told the first security guard that he saw, “I don’t care who it is, but someone has got to take me out of the country tonight!”

As I got older, questions kept nagging at me. Was there a connection between the two: between living with the weight of that reality—striving to become somebody and to live defiantly in spite of it—and suffering mental trauma? Was Maynard really plagued by delusions, or was he refusing to keep quiet about the same pain and terrors that so many of our family members try to swallow whole? Were we all actually looking at the same set of facts about our existence and coming to very different conclusions about how to cope? I asked Kendal how he’s found healing, how one finds their way out of the dark fog when tragedy and illness strike. He isn’t sure. “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.”

Some of the headlines and local commentary that came out of this period were highly racialized. As worries took on a life of their own, the media exacerbated existing divides and amplified narratives that pitted local white families against Crownsville’s patient population. The leaders of newsrooms

Murphy explained to the paper’s readers that the board of regents governing the University of Maryland had already made its supportive position clear, and that all of the university’s programs should be open to people of every creed and color. The only thing left to do was to allow that policy to take

effect.

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. —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as told to Harry Belafonte

The only problem was Vernon was Black. In fact, he was the first licensed Black psychologist in the state of Maryland. There were a few Black people working as cooks in the back, and a few farmhands who worked out in the fields with patients. But there had never been a Black member of the hospital team, and never a Black person in the dining hall. The “bomb” Commissioner George Preston had imagined back in 1943 had arrived,

was always internally dealing with that,” she explained to me. It had been too much for a small child to figure out how to respond to abuse all while being socially and racially isolated at school. At that age, Faye didn’t understand what it meant to be one of the first students to integrate a school system. She had never asked to be a pioneer. At Parole, she could

“A lot of these people [white staff] were not qualified; they wore nursing caps but they were not nurses,” she once said in an interview with social worker and historian Vanessa Jackson. One afternoon, in her cap and an ironed nurse’s dress, Sarah made her rounds on the infirmary and heard

“I’m a nurse.” The woman shouted back, “I want a real nurse. Don’t you dare put your Black hands on me!” She realized that even Black patients had internalized and reinforced the racial hierarchy at Crownsville and saw Sarah, as the only Black woman on the ward, as a signifier of inferior care. Sarah had to come to terms with the fact that she was working with hostile white colleagues, but also with people who had never imagined someone who looked like them would be allowed to walk through Crownsville’s doors as anything other than a patient.

She could overhear her parents talking about how there was a “skeleton staff.”

Morgenstern managed to move thoughtfully and quietly about the hospital grounds while simultaneously creating seismic departmental shifts all around him. Slim and standing just five foot seven, he was not an imposing man. Looking back, many employees believed it was this quiet but firm style of leadership that allowed people like Jacob Morgenstern and Vernon Sparks to transform Crownsville. Both Jacob and Vernon had been forever altered by war, eugenics, and dehumanization. Both men had traveled through Europe and studied in New York. But in Maryland, their missions converged. It was an outsider and a refugee—not one of Maryland’s cultural or political

Reporters from the Washington Star and the Washington Post got access to the parents’ meeting. And although most of the parents there that night insisted to reporters that race had nothing to do with it, and that they were worried about space, leaky pipes, and cleanliness, the issue of color appeared to be the elephant in the room. One father, Herbert A. Schiebel, was less shy about his position:

His fear wasn’t only for the children and families of Rosewood, but for what this might do to the entire balance and culture in Maryland.

Dr. Perkins was struggling to articulate a strategy. But privately, he was exactly who many of the Rosewood parents suspected he was. He was sympathetic to the children at Crownsville and convinced that the drive behind the opposition was primarily racism.

The next day, the Baltimore Sun ran a story that read, “The tradition of segregating races in State mental institutions was broken yesterday when 15 Negro children were moved from Crownsville State Hospital to Rosewood Training School.”

Desegregation was not the cure to the hospital’s problems but rather its new and messy rebirth. As Black staff took on new responsibilities and grew close to their patients, they found themselves bound by the same indifferent, violent, and bureaucratic forces that Eichert had no patience for. The difference, though, was that they couldn’t simply walk away.

My grandmother’s identity straddled different worlds—metaphorically and literally alienating her. She was too hard on herself to ever admit it, but she transcended many of the cultural and social limitations imposed on her.

Over the years, Crownsville had developed into a dumping ground—a place that seemed to swallow the undesired, poor, and nonconforming Black residents of Maryland and, at times, deny them fundamental human rights. Black employees, many of whom came from the same neighborhoods and conditions as their patients, found themselves working under impossible and ethically compromising conditions. They were not always confident that their work was enough to outweigh the harm, but the alternative—a return to the days of a white-only professional staff—seemed far worse.

For most of his life, mental illness and trauma weren’t discussed. Not in the way he is now able to name it. Back then, if someone was depressed, 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.

Annapolis and Crownsville reshaped the way Rodney views mental illness, and turned him into someone who likes to talk openly about depression and anxiety. His view is that people are not the problem. Rodney has learned not to judge the way people deal with their emotions. When developing a character or writing a script, Rodney tries to be gentle—even with his antagonists.

Dr. Meng was concerned that local agencies were not willing to accept their obligation to serve the patients who were ready for discharge back into the community. He estimated “that about 40% of our patients could be handled without hospitalization if anybody made an effort to do so.”

According to the piece, Meng “deserted in despair.” Even with the best of intentions,

“Segregation was expensive,” the article read, “and the people who suffer most when budgets are cut are the patients in the Jim Crow institution.”

I believe that madness is part of all of us, all the time, that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes.

Historical records and employee testimony suggest Crownsville became emblematic of a broader, shape-shifting carceral ecosystem in the late twentieth century. The lines between incarceration and treatment, jail and hospital, became even muddier than they were before. As the patient became the inmate, the hospital’s story raised the question: what was the difference between deeming Black populations irredeemable or incurable?

Everyone says, ‘Community mental health centers are great’—as long as they are in somebody else’s community.”

He had come to a harsh conclusion. “The only time the problems of these people will finish is when they go under the grave. I am sorry to say this, but it is the truth and we shouldn’t play games with their lives.”

According to Paul, some records never made it to the archives, however. He was told that someone made the decision to place a collection of papers documenting past incidents of abuse at the hospital into a shredder once Paul retired from the hospital that spring.

According to state health officials and a budget proposal from Republican governor Robert Ehrlich, Crownsville’s closing would save the state $12 million.

In their view, Crownsville Hospital and the patients it served had less political power, fewer nonprofit contacts, and no pharmaceutical industry relationships. In other words, these were the easiest patients to disappoint.

Many rested their hands close to the cross’s heart, others kneeled down to the ground, connecting their fingers to the soil that had mixed with a century of their ancestors’ bones. Some came that day because, like Faye, they had worked here and continued to feel a combination of deep pride and grief. Others came to search for stones and signs—they were hunting for their own surname, trying desperately to find the missing piece of a puzzle in their family lineage.

Generations have kept on running, afraid to turn and look back. But you cannot outrun pain. It will creep down the branches of your family tree until it finds someone who is tiring of the sprint. It will take hold of that person who is willing to acknowledge that it is there, and demand that they find their way back through the forest.

Rosenberg agreed to introduce a bill mandating that the state could not sell the cemetery land.

“Let me say this to you,” she said, as she turned into her neighborhood in Shady Side, Maryland. “I was trained in all kinds of holds. We knew how to take down [violent] patients. You always leave space so people can breathe.”

“We have to find an audience that even wants to listen. But if they do want to listen, boy, do we have a story to tell.”

The rest of us have to decide if we’re open to listening or if we are going to continue burying our heads deeper and deeper into the sand. The crises of mental illness, housing insecurity, and income inequality bear down on all of us. There will be more Jordan Neelys who come into public view and refuse to be quiet about the humiliations they’ve endured. We can try to construct cities and communities where these embarrassments remain out of view, where we keep up this lie that we are separate and unscathed, but it is only going to get harder. There are too many people who know the truth. There are too many families with loved ones who may call out for help in the future.

As every clinician knows, a lack of medication didn’t create the conditions for the disease. If pills are all they can offer as a profession, they aren’t much of a medical profession at all.