Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
by Antonia Hlyton
Legacy Lit, 2024
[Publication date: January 23, 2024]
New York Times Bestseller
Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Books of January
In the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a page-turning 93-year history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation’s last segregated asylums, that the New York Times described
as “fascinating…meticulous research” and bestselling author Clint Smith
endorsed it as “a book that left me breathless.”
On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into
the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor,
the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and
harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first
twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. For
centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum.
In Madness,
Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the
93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated
asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this
day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of
patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a
decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness
chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered
as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton
also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and
the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
As
Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny
city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of
America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil
rights. During its peak years, the hospital’s wards were overflowing
with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum
faded from view as prisons and jails became America’s new focus.
In Madness, Hylton
traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies
and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating
and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or
criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable.
National Indie Bestseller
ELLE Magazine's Best (and Most Anticipated) Nonfiction Books of 2024
Entertainment Weekly’s Best Books to Read 2024
REVIEWS:
“A thoroughgoing, often shocking exposé of segregation in the treatment (or nontreatment) of mental illness. [A] strong contribution to the literature of both mental health care and civil rights.” Kirkus (Starred Review)
"Hylton writes a scathing exposé on the bigotry that led to the mistreatment of hundreds of Black patients and the attempts to cover it up. Her book is also a call to action to reform the systems that treat people diagnosed with mental illnesses…This well-researched title is an important chronicle of the treatment of Black Americans and their mental health during the Jim Crow era. Beyond promoting systemic change, Hylton compels readers to look within to assess how they treat and view the people around them.” -- Library Journal
“A meticulous work of research and commitment . . . Madness is a radically complex work of historical study, etching the intersections of race, mental health, criminal justice, public health, memory, and the essential quest for human dignity.”--ELLE
"Madness is an all-too-true story, tirelessly and comprehensively reported, of the reinstatement of antebellum conditions under the guise of mental-health treatment — an asylum for so-called “feeble-minded” Blacks that was, in fact, little more than slavery by another name. Antonia Hylton’s sensitive, searching account of the people forever changed by this place — and its very clear, dreadful connection to today’s carceral state — will leave you dumbfounded.”--Robert Kolker, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Hidden Valley Road
"Antonia Hylton expertly weaves together a moving personal narrative, in-depth reporting, and illuminating archival research to produce a book that left me breathless. Madness is a haunting and revelatory examination of the way that America's history of racism is deeply entangled in our mental health system. A profoundly important book that helps us make sense of an underexamined aspect of our country’s history." Clint Smith, New York Times bestselling author of Above Ground and How the Word is Passed
“Madness is a necessary and unforgettable book. It is a particular story of a Jim Crow institution that devastated the lives of many suffering Black Americans, but it is also a collective story about how mental health care is a social justice issue, and a personal story about love, loss, and holding onto loved ones through the ravages of living. With powerful and vulnerable writing, alongside diligent research, Hylton has delivered an important and timely work.” --Imani Perry, National Book Award winner and New York Times bestselling author of South to America
“Madness is a work of pure genius. Antonia Hylton breathtakingly joins archival persistence and keen insight to tell the story of lives lived and died at Crownsville, formerly Maryland’s Hospital for the Negro Insane. With courage and tenacity, she uncovers forgotten narratives and past crimes – and in so doing deepens our understanding of how ‘our traumas and illnesses are frequently intertwined with American history and the peculiar reality of being Black.’ This beautiful, brave, heartbreaking, and urgently important work will change the ways you think about race, sanity, and community.”
--Jonathan Metzl, author of Dying of Whiteness
"Madness is a remarkable feat of reporting, penetrating centuries-old brick walls to reveal in vivid detail long buried truths about the racism at the heart of our nation's ongoing mental health crisis. Many books are described as urgent. This one actually is." --Wesley Lowery, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of American Whitelash
“Madness is a haunting history of Crownsville Hospital, a segregated asylum in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Sweeping in its reach, the book—with its use of oral history and a rich archive—offers an astonishing account of the complex relation of race, racism, and mental healthcare in America. But there is something more intimate in these pages: a story about families, about the failures of our country, and about the madness that touches us all. A powerful read!” --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Princeton University professor and New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again
“Hylton’s in-depth probing investigation of Crownsville’s history answers essential questions about what happened to the Black population of mentally ill decades after Emancipation.” --King Davis, PhD, Research Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information
Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and two-time Emmy award-winning Correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC. She is also the cohost of the hit podcasts Southlake and Grapevine.
From 2016 to 2020, Antonia was a Correspondent and Producer for Vice Media and HBO’s nightly news and documentary show, Vice News Tonight. Since 2019, she has also served as an annual judge for the American Mosaic Journalism Prize.
Antonia’s won several awards, including an Emmy for the HBO special episode on the family separation crisis, two Gracie Awards for her stories about women, a NAMIC Vision Award for reporting on violence and politics in Chicago, and two Front Page Awards for special reporting and breaking news.
Antonia graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2015, where she received prizes for her writing and investigative research on race, mass incarceration, and the history of psychiatry.
by Uché Blackstock
Viking, 2024
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“This book is more than a memoir—it also serves as a call to action to create a more equitable healthcare system for patients of color, particularly Black women.” —Essence
One of NPR’s 11 Books to Look Forward to in 2024
One of Good Morning America’s 15 New Books to Read for the New Year
“Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uché Blackstock is a force of nature.” —Abraham Verghese, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Covenant of Water
“[An] extraordinary family story.” —Dr. Damon Tweedy, The New York Times Book Review
“This book should be required reading for all medical students.” —Gayle King, CBS Mornings
The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.
What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.
Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.
“[An] extraordinary family story.” —Dr. Damon Tweedy, The New York Times Book Review
“This book should be required reading for all medical students.” —Gayle King, CBS Mornings
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
