Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

by Antonia Hylton

In January 1947 the unnamed author of an article titled “Why We Go Crazy” offered his or her admittedly nonscientific analysis for why so many African Americans were being sent to asylums. After noting that psychiatric experts had discussed the disproportionate rates of mental disease among Blacks, the author offered “a few contributing factors” for our consideration: Colored persons always come up on the short end of jobs and pay… They ride the rear seats of many interstate buses, trains and boats because an outmoded Jim Crow law is still on the statute books. Some stores in Baltimore refuse to serve them at all, while others take their money, but employ them only as broom pushers. They get the worst housing and pay the most for it. Merely sitting down and thinking about these and countless other things just as bad in a nation that is trying to sell the world on the democratic way of life could drive a lot of people crazy, and it probably does.