Madness Quotes

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

“In the years after Reconstruction, on average, 150 people—almost all Black—were lynched every year in America. By 1892, lynchings peaked at 235. From Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Wilmington, North Carolina, and everywhere in between, a constant drum of racial violence bred a state of paranoia in most Black people, a worry that any step deemed wrong by white neighbors or authorities could end with their body dangling from a tree limb.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“open porches on thin straw pads. At the time, Crownsville housed every type of patient together—from the criminally insane to those diagnosed with tuberculosis—something that the other, white-only asylums were not doing, and that many clinicians had warned against. During his arrival and amid the First World War, 275 acres of hospital land were under cultivation thanks to unpaid patient labor. Officials were arranging to use patients in their wartime preparedness plans.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“complicate them. My wish is that Madness will help us understand both our current, broken mental healthcare system and our carceral one. At the heart of Crownsville lie a couple of questions: What is the difference between calling a Black patient incurable and deeming a Black population certain of criminal recidivism? To what extent could this legacy be at fault for a current reality in which many communities of color feel alienated by psychiatric services and our prisons and jails are full of people suffering from mental illness? And along the way, I ask doctors, patients, and family what we can do about it.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Crownsville was one of the few American segregated asylums with records that had been preserved and a campus that was still standing.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Toward the Black patients especially there’s an attitude of ‘Don’t even talk to me,’” they explained. “It’s a form of remote incarceration. You’re really not trying to deal with the person in a human way.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Yet I feel compelled to write about the history of psychiatry and mental illness due to two forces: fury at the lack of services and support available in this country—particularly for the poor and people of color—and then out of pure, unyielding curiosity, as in both my personal life and in my reporting, I keep confronting this absence of help.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“and subtle differences in word choice suggested that while residents may have expected the institution to manage aggressive Black patients, they anticipated the rehabilitation of white patients.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“He was a Confederate sympathizer who opposed slavery, not because he thought Black people were equal, but because he worried it would make white people lazy.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Some argue that Matthew Williams’s lynching was, at least in part, in response to”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Entering Crownsville’s grounds, Ms. Fitzgerald found the campus quite beautiful. She appreciated the healing powers of a country setting, and she looked out at the cluster of buildings and farmland, set back from the road. However, once behind its solid brick walls, she found a different story. She noted that the female patients’ wards were dreary and that the rooms in which some of the “inmates” were locked were bare and depressing. She wrote some reflections down, assuming that this dreariness was due to a personnel shortage—and the fact that the personnel who were there were not highly trained.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Patient labor was often called industrial therapy, and it was popular in virtually every American mental hospital in the first half of the twentieth century.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“It was a bleak and unsettling picture. At no point did the journalist pause to consider why these two Black men in 1912 might have been searching for some sense of status and order in the world. The reader is in on the joke. We know who is really in charge on the farm.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“What does it mean to be healthy and well enough to clear the woods, build a road, and construct a hospital, yet also be so sick you require institutionalization? How do we decide who’s irredeemable and who’s capable of recovery? What role have men like Robert Winterode played in alienating Black patients from therapy and care?”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“For decades, they would be more likely to die there than find their way home.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“A place that conveniently became both a solution to white Marylanders’ concerns and a pen for the Black people who’d just built it.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“the state of Virginia to create the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane in 1870,”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“In Maryland, these patients, who had previously lived in subhuman conditions in poorhouses around the state,”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“I hear that their sick family members have had more interactions with the criminal justice system than they have with social safety nets or hospitals, and that the more stressors, poverty, and violence they are subjected to, the less empathy they seem to receive from their neighbors.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“I come from a family with a history of mental trauma.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“was frustrated, but I pressed on. Finding patients who were alive and able to speak on the record for this book was incredibly,”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“As it turned out, the state had destroyed or lost most of the files preceding the year 1960, and others they had allowed to become contaminated with asbestos. One employee would allege that a collection of files detailing incidents of patient abuse had been shredded shortly after his retirement”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“To view Crownsville Hospital’s records, I would need to be approved by both Harvard researchers and the state of Maryland. I would need letters of recommendation, and have the patience to wait weeks and weeks for someone to respond or process a piece of paperwork”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Researchers and interested members of the public cannot simply walk into Maryland State Archives and ask to see Crownsville’s records. They are restricted and carefully guarded, and the state has a responsibility to protect patient privacy. However, as the years pass, I hope more of these documents are made readily available to researchers and to families who might be looking for loved ones and clues.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“Through out the 1850s and 1860s, Maryland lawmakers passed resolutions that barred Black people from assembling for religious events, owning dogs or guns, or being educated, and that limited job opportunities. It was a ban from self-protection, growth, and hope.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

“The specter of racial violence had become so effective that it was hovering over my loved one without ever having to come knock at the door.”
― Antonia Hylton, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum