Madness Quotes

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens? Paul and many of the employees at Crownsville remind me of a story I grew up hearing from the Caribbean side of my family. One of my aunts in particular loved the Starfish Story. Legend has it that a young Black boy—in Haiti or Cuba or the Dominican Republic, you choose—is walking along a beach that is littered with starfish. Thousands upon thousands of starfish have washed up onto the shore following a terrible storm and they are helpless, dehydrating in the sun. So the little boy begins picking the starfish up one by one and throwing them back into their home in the water. Other people at the beach look at the boy, laugh, and call him naive. One person approaches him and tells him bluntly, “Give up. It makes no difference. You’ll never be able to save all of these starfish.” The boy pauses for a second. He looks up, then leans back down to toss another starfish into the sea. “It makes a difference for that one.” Many of the people of Crownsville decided that it was better to throw as many starfish back into the ocean as they could rather than abandon them all on the shore.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Bad and painful things happen in hidden pockets and closets, allowing the city on a hill overlooking the Chesapeake to offer up half-truths about its history. There are the tourist traps where there were slave ships. Urban renewal and an aggressive campaign to preserve the city’s historic mansions have successfully transformed neighborhoods that were 80 percent Black to almost entirely white. There are paddleboards and luxury motorboats parked where Black watermen once earned a living.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“When I spent my weekends in Annapolis, Faye Belt and I would go driving and she’d show me where her patients had gone and would explain the architecture of her hometown. Annapolis, the community that looked toward the sparkling waters of the Chesapeake, had mastered the art of concealing the people, bodies, and homes it did not want you to find. But Faye knew where to look.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“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?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The United States government takes a tough-on-crime stance, instituting new drug and mandatory minimum sentencing laws that disproportionately affect Black communities and lead to an influx of young Black men into overcrowded prisons. This is a powerful and thorough narrative, but it begins at its middle, not at its beginning. It does not completely address why it was that the prison—and not another social support or institution—suddenly became the chosen receptacle for America’s surplus people and social ills. It was the asylum, not the prison, that had long been America’s mammoth institution. In 1952, less than 150 per 100,000 people were incarcerated in state and federal prisons, while over 600 per 100,000 were living in some form of asylum. And at the close of World War II, the ethnoracial makeup of American convicts was proportional to our national demographics: approximately 70 percent of the prison population identified as white and 30 percent as “other.” By the end of the twentieth century it had completely overturned to 70 percent African American and Latino and 30 percent white. Crownsville’s records suggest that, while the story is nowhere near as simple as one institution morphing into the other, it is no coincidence that the end of the twentieth century marks both the decline of the mental hospital and the expansion of the prison system.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Skloot discovered Elsie’s story as she embarked on a decade-long retracing of Henrietta Lacks’s life with Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter and Elsie’s younger sister. Her work uncovered the unbelievable story behind the tissue that doctors at Johns Hopkins extracted from Elsie’s mother and used without her consent to develop an immortal, and seemingly invaluable, human cell line, known as HeLa. But as her mother’s cells were transformed into billion-dollar drugs and vaccines, Elsie was at Crownsville. The evidence suggests she was used by science, too.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The historical record confirms much of what the employees described. In a 1953 article, “Crowding of Youths at Crownsville Told,” the chief supervisor of social work at Crownsville, Gwendolyn Lee, noted that some of the overflowing patient population was not arriving of its own will. The hospital received “too many teenagers with no hope,” she said, and many of them arrived by force. Lee argued that there was “too large a percentage of cases where people are picked up off the street and taken to Crownsville without the knowledge of relatives… Less than 2% of the mentally ill are brought by relatives.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In March 1981, after a racially mixed jury failed to find a local Black man guilty of the murder of a white man, a group of Ku Klux Klan members set out driving around the city, looking for any random Black person to murder. They spotted young Michael walking back home, carrying a pack of cigarettes he had picked up for his sister. The KKK kidnapped him, beat him with a tree limb, slit his throat three times, and left his body hanging. Maynard and Kendal knew this tree. They knew its shape, its knots and wrinkles. Maynard used to drive past the tree on Herndon Avenue all the time. One of the perpetrators became the only KKK member executed for the murder of a Black person during the entire twentieth century.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Today the city of Annapolis seems quaint and charming on the surface, and in the mind of many Americans it lives in Baltimore’s boisterous shadow. But the city is not just Maryland’s capital—it was once our nation’s. The Treaty of Paris was ratified here in January 1784, marking an official end to the Revolutionary War. It is also the site where on September 29, 1767, Kunta Kinte allegedly arrived in America aboard a ship called Lord Ligonier and was sold into bondage by a man named John Ridout. Author Alex Haley told the infamous, semi-fictionalized account of his ancestor in Roots, and while millions of people around the world have come to know his heritage, they do not always remember that the city of Annapolis is where Kinte’s journey in America supposedly began.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“1961”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“the “crime” of frightening a white woman on a road”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Between 1889 and 1930”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Being institutionalized at Crownsville was like serving a sentence.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“After all that she had seen, she left that day most concerned about the prospects of the staff—not the patients.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Brewer Hill Cemetery is the oldest resting place for Black Annapolitans. Black families continue to fight for its restoration. But if you peer through the trees, you can see a pristine military cemetery maintained by the government. Photo by Cassandra Giraldo.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“I believe that madness is part of all of us, all the time, that it comes and goes, waxes and wanes. —Otto Friedrich”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“They were human, and the longer they worked there, the more often they found themselves in situations that forced them to ask the same questions over and over again. Is it worth it, doing incremental good in an imperfect system? Can you be a good person and work somewhere where something like this happens?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The total Department of Mental Hygiene budget for 1969 was over $56 million, but ninety-seven cents of every dollar spent on mental health was still going to the hospitals. Leaving only 3 percent allocated to the community programs.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“As historian Jonathan Engel argued in a sprawling investigation of deinstitutionalization and the movement to build Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs), the federal government “seemed oblivious” to the states’ struggles.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Black employees were often assigned to the furnaces, where they were provided with limited safety equipment and clothing. Horrible burns and life-altering accidents were routine.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In some cases, employees would administer high levels of insulin to a nondiabetic person, causing them to lose consciousness, sometimes for hours, and emerge in a strange stupor.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Surgeons would take an instrument resembling an ice pick, and through a hole drilled in the patient’s head or a pathway through the eye socket, they would cut and scrape away the connections between a patient’s prefrontal cortex and the rest of their brain.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The great 1950s push for research in mental hospitals involved numerous human rights violations,” Paul wrote to me. At the time he arrived in the 1960s, staff were sometimes still offering patients cigarettes and candies in exchange for trying out new drugs.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Plagued by low funding and negative public perception, the hospital seemed incapable of escaping its legacy of systematic racism. “Segregation was expensive,” the article read, “and the people who suffer most when budgets are cut are the patients in the Jim Crow institution.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“If a fight broke out at Carr’s Beach and the jail was too full, you were sent to Crownsville. If you were young and unsupervised late at night, you were taken to Crownsville.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It’s impossible to quantify how many Black children lost or lost track of parents, aunts, uncles, and friends to the hospital. In fact, it took decades for Rodney to come to terms with his aunt’s story.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“wanted to know more about the moral gray areas, the painful decisions, the bizarre balance of power between white employee, Black employee, and Black patient.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“So in 1953, when the National Mental Health Association asked asylums around the country to mail in any shackles or chains they’d previously used, Maryland leaders were eager to take part.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“By the late 1940s, stories about violent escapes, aggressive Black men, and the anxieties of white residents were becoming routine.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Some patients had their own beds. Others slept on straw ticks and wooden benches. There were three toilets, three washbasins, and one tub to be shared by over ninety floormates.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum