i am honored to introduce antonia hylton to all of you. antonia is a peabody and emmy

award winning journalist at nbc news reporting on politics and civil rights and the co-host of the hit podcast south lake. she graduated from harvard university, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. tonight, she will be talking about her book madness as race and insanity in the jim crow asylum and this insightful and necessary work of nonfiction. antonia chronicles the 93 year old history of crown civil hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a compass that still stands to this day and arundel county, maryland. through exhaustive research, she not only tells the legacy of this mental institution, but also contextualizes grantsville within the larger legacy and history of americans. societies attitude towards race, mental health and the intersection between the two. in their starred review of the

book, kirkus reviews writes that madness is a thoroughgoing, often shocking expert say of segregation in the treatment or not treatment of mental illness. a strong contribution to the literature of both mental health care and civil rights. and tonya will be in conversation with astead herndon asset as a national politics reporter for the new york times and a political analyst for cnn. here's a post he reports and hosts the run up a political podcast from the new york times, which was named one of the best podcasts of 2022 by the economist. previously, he was an integral part of the times political coverage in the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential elections. in 2020, he was named to the forbes magazine's 30 under 30 media list. his reporting on white grievance and former president donald trump was included among the new york times package that was a finalist for the 2021 pulitzer prizes. everyone antonia hylton and

astead herndon. for. a long. thank you. all. oh, it's so nice to be here. has anyone doing it? it's nice to see to be in the space to be able to talk about this incredible work and most importantly, to help you welcome antonia hylton. the author of madness brought it up again in. newtown. i am so excited to be here in dc. i have a sister in the crowd somewhere. yeah, we got a sister way night

and there are some people who are in the book here too. and i'm very grateful to them for making the drive awesome. i'm really excited to be here, partially because i think madness is a unique work that a few things stand out. i think the biggest one is the scope of reporting that really went into it, and i really want to lay that out for folks. you said it was the combination of ten years of digging and i wanted to know ten years ago, how did you come to the realization that this is what you wanted to write? this is the story that you landed on? yeah, it was just a teenage year. i was about 18, 19 on harvard's campus, and i stumbled into a class called madness and medicine. and i was interested the history of psychiatry, i think because of my own family upbringing and a kind of personal longing or curiosity, i guess i'm one of seven kids. i come from a very big black family with roots in georgia, in virginia and detroit. and we are all very close. but the one topic a lot of elders in my family had trouble

with was anything having to do with emotions, tough memories or mental health. and for me and my siblings, it was often really frustrating to try to talk to people about stories we knew or family members who were missing, and we couldn't get answers from our own loved ones. and so i think when i was a teenager and i just had the opportunity for the first time in my life to study what i wanted to study, do stuff on my own, frankly, i realized that i could try to find myself my own people in this space and get my own answers. and so, you know, my first frustration was actually the often the history of psychiatry has taught virtually exclusively from the perspective of white europeans and white americans. and so i really had to dig it first. and so i found a few of these institutions and brownsville is one of the only ones that had surviving records and people who had been there. i mean, it closed in 2004 with

all of our lifetimes. and so it presented this opportunity and i was really just sucked into the work. i didn't know i was going to write a book as a teenager, but i knew that this was something really important, that it was going to stick with me for a long time. and so even after i graduated, i just kept building new relationships and kept reporting out the story because it was so personal. i mean, is it that personal connection that had you land on brownsville specifically? because i get the general interest in kind of this issue coming from your family. how did that story really jump out? is it the records that were able to be found, too? i think it's i think it's a combination. it's that the ability to see yourselves reflected in a space that you thought you you were excluded from, it was access to records the state had destroyed purposely an accident mentally. a lot of the records, especially those preceding 1960, 1955. but there was a lot to still see. and then there were living people.

and to me that was actually really critical that i wasn't just going to be taking doctors about patients, their reflections on the population they served their own letters back and forth, politicians perspectives on a certain institu ation, which is what you often see left behind. but that there were people who i could go to, i could gather their memories, record their voices, their facial expressions, and that's so important, particularly in a community that has been systematic, excluded or mistreated by this institute shown so that their voices at the center of it and that whatever i produced for that was at first just an academic project or it was finally a book that it really reflected the community, this institution was supposed to serve. you mentioned that some of the people in the book are here. do you want to point them out? you want to point out they're significance to the book. are you comfortable with that? that's a belt for anyone who's read the book. you know that fay plays a very big role in brownsville. some ways, fay is brownsville.

she's well, she was raised on the hospital's property. her mother was one of the very first black nurses to get the opportunity to work at this institution that previously only allowed white doctors and nurses to to serve the black patients there. and so her mom's part of this initial group that integrates the space and she follows in her mom's footsteps. and yeah, she deserves that credit. no. and in doing so, i tell the story of a friend of hers and a patient whose life she plays a role in saving. and it stories like that were so important for me to find because i think often when people learn about these spaces, they're they are taught or told a very one note stereotypical story or a ghost story, a goosebumps like tale. and that's not what these institutions are. in the early decades, brownsville is this very dreary place, renowned for racial

violence and overcrowding and filth. but in fifties and sixties, as people like the belt family arrive, they do start to change the face of this institution. and you actually get this strange glimpse of something we don't have anymore, which is a mental health care system in which community is actually serving and taking care of community in which the doctors look exactly like their patients. that is really rare right now. there's really almost nowhere that black people suffering with mental health challenges right now could go and know that their doctors and nurses wouldn't look like them, but have gone to the same high school they went to and shop at the shop at the same grocery store. and that starts to make a big difference. and what was the that was a length of time for only backgrounds where they came and went. what was the period in relationship to the crown development as a whole? you i'm saying because that only existed after they integrated initially. so can you give people a perspective of just how small that window of time really was? well, i'll take you first back a ways and then bring you back up,

forward. so brownsville is founded in 1911 and after decade of white doctors, politicians, thinkers, debate with each other very openly in medical journals, in newspapers, at professional conferences. their theories of black people's bodies and minds, and a prevailing idea at the time was that emancipation in some ways had been a big mistake, that freedom was something black people couldn't handle, and that it was directly responsible for what they saw as a rising insanity among black people and so they create institutions like brownsville to solve that problem. but in 1911, they realized they have this need, but they do not want to pay for it. and so they do something to black patients that they never do to any other type of patient. they force them to build the asylum from the ground up. and so in those early years of brownsville is really like a plantation. there's this desire to go back to the good old days, to reconstruct the antebellum social structure as a form of

therapy. yes, yeah, yeah. i know you laugh, but this is something people truly wrote and published and and debated at the time. and it informed their care well up until the forties and fifties, when those women start and men start to get their their feet in the door for the very first time and they are then in this weird period where there's sort of this upper crust group of employees, or mostly white, who worked at the institution for a long time. there's new black employees who arrive and they know their patients, but they don't have a lot of power. and then there is the patient at the very bottom of that totem pole. and so there is a period in the forties and fifties and sixties, a real power struggle actually, before you get to the community, mental health care moment. and then in the sixties and seventies, frankly, a lot of those white people quit. they don't want to work here anymore. they do not want to be an integrated workplace. and they say that openly. there are parts of the book where i, i write about the

memories of black women like going to the cafe to pick up their sandwich and hearing their white colleagues say, i wish brownsville was the way it used to be. yeah. and so they finally get the opportunity to take over this institution. and so i'd say that that period lasts from about like the seventies and eighties. but the thing that's so frustrating for them at that moment, as said, is that that's the same moment that the governments like. well, we don't really want to pay for this at all anymore. and we're going to start putting all our money in prisons and jails. yeah, i events that seem correlated, but can be causal. you write in the book that it's a celebration of oral history and. you seem to take a point to define oral history as just as valuable as, you know, the kind of traditional journalistic sources. when you think about records and documents, why was that also important to you and how did that and what were the gaps that you had to fill when it came to balancing how much to rely on the written word or how much or spoken word and how much to rely on documents and sourcing, which also was a huge part of it.

yeah, well, you know, first, i've always thought it was strange whenever i've seen historians or social scientists debate the value of oral history because when somebody writes a letter or a memo, even in real time, all of their prejudices and beliefs and biases are there in the present moment and then put into the historical record. and so that's why i ask in that section, you know, well, what source isn't infected with all of those things? and so the important thing for me was to see all of those sort of categories as complements to each other, not as in competition with each other. and then i think the other piece. right is especially you're talking about an institution run entirely by white people until. almost 1950. then they are writing about black people who they've openly, often admitted they do not see as fully human, who they think are so different and so strange that they need to be completely

physically separated from their white neighbors to just take their word. i mean, that would be the opposite of journalism. i mean, that would be a complete disservice. and i would be writing a story that's not true. and so i pushed not only to find people who could share their living memories with me, but also to find records to integrate things like poetry and artwork from the patients, the book, so that you can get a sense of of place, so that you can get a sense of their emotional and interior or lives and, you know, it was so disturbing to me early on in this process was i sort of knew to be prepared for the fact that the white superintendents of the hospital or doctors would write offensive things about the patients, but i think worse, almost than some of the racist stuff, they they proactively said was actually how little

interest they sometimes had in the lives of the patients. so they just wouldn't actually record anything about how they were doing if they were improving what their lives and routines were like. when you look at their monthly hospital reports, until the fifties and sixties, the hospitals primary concern month after month is how much are the patients producing? they keep very good records about the massive farm operation that the patients are running for no pay. they keep records about the patients that they have rented out to private businesses for no pay. they have records about how many rugs, how many baskets, the art and competitions that they send patients for no pay, because many of the patients were highly skilled artisans who had worked in all kinds of communities in maryland and beyond. and so that alone tells you a lot about the priorities and beliefs of the people running an institution if they were much more interested in the rugs than they were in their patients rehabilitation. you know, the other thing that

sticks out is that madness is not only a story about brownsville itself, but you talk about your family and you talk about your own kind of loved ones journey through mental health. and in the author's note, you write that you felt a responsibility, to be honest with the readers, about what shaped and motivated you. and you actually spent three years interviewing your family in the process of reporting this book. can you tell me about that experience and why was it so important to you that this wasn't just the story of brownsville, but a story that infused your own perspective? well, because that's a part is, you know, it is like there could have been a version of it where that didn't happen and so part of that, i think, is something that clearly is important. so why was there a few things on the sort of journalistic side thinking about my role as the journalist telling this story? we think of in our work of the times, the opportunities when we need to disclose something, when we just need to be honest with our reader about how we might

have come to a story, or if we have a family connection to it. whether that's whether you are a business reporter, an entertainment reporter or a civil rights reporter. and so i first felt like i had an obligation to tell you that i didn't come to this story out of nowhere. i came to the story because i come from a family that has a long history of mental trauma. i have family members who spent time in institute prisons not unlike brownsville. my great grandfather was sent to the segregated ward of a mental asylum in michigan. and while i was writing the book, anyone who's read the introduction and would see i had a family member and immediate family member dealing with a mental health crisis. and i was seeing what our system, our current system was like up close and living through the pain and challenge of trying to to save and stabilize this person while also reading the stories of so many people and families like mine. as more a century ago.

and i was deeply disturbed by the similarity. and so i think that that emotional experience has shaped the questions that i asked, shaped the editorial decisions that i made. it shaped the stories that i chose to highlight, the things that hit the cutting room floor. and so i wanted to tell my reader that, that if you're going on this journey with me, you're going to learn about brownsville through me. you should know that this is why i do this work, why i care about it. and i think you probably will feel and read on the page some of the emotional turmoil that i experienced while reporting on it. and then while also my family was trying to wrap their arms around and their resources around this person who was really struggling and i think, you know, to that point to anyone in the room who's ever had a friend or a loved one who's experienced a serious psychiatric challenge or crisis and really struggled with their mental health, you realize

you're faced with really you have to make one of two choices at some point, maybe it becomes too much. and you see people make the decision to send that person somewhere or to give up on that person to take a lot of time away from that person. but when you love people, that's a really terrible and difficult decision to make. and so your other option is to kind of meet that person, to go with that person where they are going. and if they are experiencing psychosis, as my loved one was, you know, while writing madness, in some ways i had to kind of enter it. i had to kind of submerge myself in it because. if you don't, you actually find that you're that you're a family member of your loved one or the person you're even reporting on and talking to that they'll lose trust and faith in you. you won't have an open and honest dialog. you know, you can't tell people who are suffering in that way that all the things you're afraid of aren't real. don't worry about get a good

night's sleep. pray about that on sunday. those those things actually shut people down. and so you really have to ask them actually questions from a place of curiosity like how did that experience make you feel? or that memory or thing that you saw? how did that affect you? and that's what i mean by kind of joining them in the experience, the experience that they're having. and and that emotional experience, absolute lutely shaped my reporting and so i guess i wanted to bring you into that. i think the other pieces i've discovered a lot more people have that experience than i previous. we had known. and so i wanted other people to know that if this is something you like, i have for a time had a hard time talking about you're not alone. i've been here too. there's another side of it and i didn't want to ask you to you, the reader, to be braver or to

think more creatively about our mental health care system. if i wasn't going to try to do that with you or for you to, i think that curiosity really comes through in it. but at the same time, you know, so many journalists have experiences that are informing the options. i mean, they don't feel the need to kind of come and do that. you also then talk to and reported with your family. what was that process like? because even if you made that choice, you know, that's also a thing. i'm sure you had to negotiate and walk them through to. and how was that? now it's out. like, how was that received. really well. and i swear i'm not it's not a cop out, but it has been a journey. and so there were nerves on all sides. i nervous. i was. so i interview a lot of my family for the book, especially some of the elders in my family who were present for incidents that i wasn't alive for. but but that have shaped my family and that i knew about

growing up, growing up. and so, you know, i would i would feel a little bit nervous before i called them. i would i would talk them through first what i was working on and the sort of heart and soul of the book. and i was very surprised most of the time. people were really excited about it. even my one who was dealing with these things in the current moment while i was writing it, they wanted to add their own reflections. they wanted to be interviewed. they didn't want to share their name. they weren't ready for that experience yet. but they wanted the world to know what it was like as a black person to step these institutions or the current sort of clinics and emergency rooms that we have set up to as our current mental health care system now. and they wanted they wanted people to have to reckon with that. and so i think in a strange way, sort of in the period of the pandemic and the crisis coming to my family's door in the sort

of our doorstep and the present day pushed everybody to a place where they felt like they had no other path to go but to talk. and the book became away. the reporting became a way for us to talk about some of our experiences or our pain in a way that was slightly abstract or sort of more of a community problem than just a personal and sort of isolating problem. and so i was surprised actually at how how good it all felt and how comfortable everyone was. i have not a single family member. i did have people saying like, hey, can you let me see chapter six? but but i did not have people saying delete that. don't tell everybody. you know, which i thought was very possible. i thought, okay, there's going to be some back and forth here. they wanted to see it. they didn't want to find out about it. you know, at politics and prose. but what they but they were once they felt like they were wrapped into it and they had a say in it, it was actually very smooth

sailing from there. awesome. i want to remind folks that and tennis minutes, we're going to take some audience questions and we want to make sure that we also give antonio some time to read from the book as well. so i'm going to keep going, though. you put two questions kind of at the heart of the book that i want to pose one to you. the first is what's the difference between calling black patient and curable and deeming a black population certain of criminal? and then the second one is, to what extent can this legacy be fought for a current reality in which many communities of color feel alienated from psychiatric services and our prisons and jails are full of people suffering from mental illness? let's focus. i want to let's go with the second one. how much do you think current. yeah, yeah. we'll slow down. how much do you think current issues of overincarceration and in particular does this proportionate and overall expression of black americans are connected to the racist legacy of mental health institutions that you lay out here? well, they're on the same genealogy there are all in the same tree. and one of the things of the book explores in the sixties,

seventies, eighties and beyond is how intimately tied together the asylum and the prison and jails are. i mean, literally they share some of the same employees. so people are going back and forth, working at one of the other. they share the same patient inmates who on one day are categorized as one thing, and then the next week or another and they also inspire each other and start to kind of steal each other's architecture and and processes, and then you start to start to see the jail and prison system, the sort of carceral system, sort of eat up. what's been left of mental health care. and one of the things that i try to help people kind of make sense of in that period is that there's all these very messy and concurrent trends going on in the late 20th century.

one of them is that, broadly speaking, people are becoming more and more sympathetic toward patients because medication arrives. politicians like jfk and others are pushing for community mental health care. get them back home, get them into vocational training, get them jobs, get them out. and they want to shutter these asylums. and so, you know, there's all this media and film that is dealing with mental illness and trying to destigmatize it in some ways for the first time. and so we're seeing patients come out and people feel more sympathy. but there's also the civil rights movement going on. black people are protesting and visibly angry in public in ways that many american institutions and thinkers weren't quite ready for in the moment. and there's this immediate and very harsh backlash and carceral response to that. and so at the very moment that there's more sympathy for a lot of white patients leaving asylums, there's actually less and less sympathy for black

americans as concerns about this country and those people are there. pain is sort of being pathologized, criminalized and that culminates. there's this chapter called the curious case of the oakton three, where i look at three civil rights protesters who go to a restaurant in elkton, maryland and they sit down. i mean, they don't even mean to do a protest this day. they're just hungry. yeah, they're just living and they're just living. and they sit down and it turns out this is a whites only place they're asked to leave. they refuse to leave the police show up and pick them up and they are deemed insane for the crime of trying to eat at a white owned restaurant. and they end up days in townsville on a hunger strike. and i think that that story, when i first discovered at first i was i was just in shock that i hadn't been taught this history, that no one had showed me the way that the mental health care system had aligned itself with and become embedded in the criminal justice system in that

period that i didn't know the story of these three people who fought fought this fight. but i think that this story tells you everything about the sort of trends and thinking of that and the way in which black americans very legitimate concerns about this country, that how and psychology actually collab traded in dismissing disrespecting and discrediting black americans concerns ideas and beliefs. and so these institutions kind of get closer and closer until one sort of starts to eat up the other. and i kind of argue in the book, each era in this country builds upon the era that came right before it. and so when we live in a where in many communities in the united states, your local largest provider of mental health care services is a prison or jail. there are many people who cannot get access to medication or inpatient treatments that they need until they are arrested and get access to doctors who are

working in these prisons and jails. i think that tells you a lot about how we got here and you can't make sense of why it is this way without understand all those concurrent shifts. i mean, just broke down, you know, the story of crown groundswell was in the shadows for a long time, was new to me. i think that the story makes clear, though, that it was not new to the people. annapolis life true for the black community that was lives were shaped by either having residents and family were there or by working there. i know that you recently had a book event out there. i'm curious on like how that was specifically received. the community whose stories are so to the to the book. i think it was beautiful. it really was not it was not a there are some people who were there right over there. it was not a normal book event, i'll tell you that. it was like church. there was a choir that sang beautiful selections. you know, people were laughing and crying.

there were a lot of elders in the community who came out who hadn't seen their friends in a long time, getting the opportunity to reconnect over food and drinks. it was much bigger than than me or a book or me answering questions about the book because many in audience knew more about this place than me. mean they lived in. and so it was really a celebration, i think a moment for a lot black health care workers, frankly, to get their day in the sun, their their moment in the spotlight after decades of work in the system, not a whole lot of credit, not a whole lot of support from maryland state government. and to kind of thank themselves, to pat themselves on the back and to reflect. there were patients there, too. i'm just getting the chance to celebrate how far their lives have come, you know, that they overcame their experience there, that they that they there was more to their story than just being at brownsville. and so i thought that was really

and beautiful to and so yeah i showed up that day. i knew how that night was going to go. but it was so much in the laughing. let's make no, they surprised me with some things. i mean, it was it was really special. but but the flipside of that right, is i think it tells you just how much a community has been yearning and trying to get people to listen to them. i'm, in fact, one doctor, a psychiatrist, to work at brownsville for a long time named dr. brian sims told me at one point when i interviewed him, he was like the story of black people in annapolis, a city at it for anyone here who's visited is very beautiful, quaint. you know, people think about the luxury boats out on the water and paddle boarding and cute historical tours of colonial buildings that annapolis has done. a this real great job at, concealing a lot of its dirtiest secrets, papering over the darkest parts of its history and

it not allowing its black citizens to have a say in the story of the city and the broader, you know, county in arundel surrounding it and i think for many of them, their whole reason they wanted to speak to me in the first place, why they answered the phone. a 19 year old called them, was that they were looking to tell the story and nobody had cared. yeah, it's also, of course, a testament to the work and the journalism that like that story was being yearned for but also had to be told in the way that felt authentic to the community. i think that really comes through in the book. i mean, you've put a focus on the black health care workers that change crown bill's face, that changed its actual practices i guess it read to me also as a larger kind of a larger kind of residents around representation that in this structure that was not built to really support the kind of core rehabilitation process that they were trying to make marginal or make the gains where they could. can you did you read it as a kind of that and what were the

limits and kind of power that you learned about what they were able to do once brownsville kind of staff and employment did change faces? well, the staff is put into this sort of strange that power dynamic that i was describing before, and even once there's this period in which the staff is, there are a whole lot of black staff members at every level. still, much of the administra ation and in control of the hospital's majority white and so they're kind of bumping up against this this ceiling and representation really only can go so far and what they are able to do the way that they are able to affect outcomes. what's fascinating to me is that often it has very little to do with medication or a new technology arriving or a new training or practice or so. much of it is their own individual decisions and the

ways in which they try to just bring a little bit more humanity and and love to work every day. none of this being particularly scientific or rocket science. i mean, they come in and they realize that there's there aren't enough clothing for patients in those early decades. so they start making sewing and bringing in their own supplies to the hospital without the support or recognition from the state they start male patients on one ward, notorious pants that don't fit them. so they're falling down all day long and they're constantly exposed and and humiliated and. so women create these sort of makeshift belts or so. and it's those actions. it's listening to them. i mean, in many cases, women start calling some of the relatives that they know that live in baltimore or annapolis and just saying, hey, did you know so-and-so is here? at one point, a nurse named betty hawkins tells me this unbelievable story about, you know, within the first her first year on the job finding out that

a patient's brother didn't know for 27 years that his brother was in the institution, that he'd been lost for that long. and so her decision to make a phone call may sound very small, but it's that kind of thing that hadn't been happening for so, so long and so they're able to make change. but change is this sort of in individual day to day grind? and they're not able to make this massive institutional shift that they might have dreamed or hoped they were going to make when they first got those jobs. and certainly once they start to see the writing on the wall and they start hearing rumors that the state wants to target brownsville closed down brownsville, the money is drying up. the budgets. slashed every year to the state of maryland. it's not come off great in here. the chronic the chronic miss starts at the beginning and is a through line through the whole thing. yeah. i think it's very telling that at the end of the book the department that was responsible, that still exists, that was responsible for all of

brownsville operations would not answer single question. yeah, not even in writing. they would not send me a pr statement. i was expecting least something like, oh, we acknowledge the history and oh, you know, we i don't know, i don't know. we know we know. but they were like, oh, by no, no, no, please stop emailing us. so in a west morgue, governor westmore did speak with me, but he was. he wasn't here for. yeah, that's. and and, you know, it'll be interesting. it's going to be very fascinating. now, for those of you who live near this site to see what happens in the next 3 to 5 years, the county now they're they say that they're going to turn this into a memorial park, a massive community space that's supposed to be for healing. they want to give former parts of the asylum, some of the buildings and leftover spaces that still stand. they want to give them to mental health treatment spaces and

nonprofits. they want to create housing for veterans and the elderly. they want to create public gardens that children can use to grow vegetables and flowers. but it'll it'll be interesting to see if and how politics and bureaucracy seep into all of that. these big promises made to this community that hasn't been listened for so long. and you know, now they need to live up to those things after so many years of refusing to answer basic questions about. and so i think we'll know very soon just how serious are they about it? and how ready are people to actually live with and sit with this history. and the last question i have is, you know, can you put collinsville in context of the way the state other mental health institutions were operating, how much did you in your reporting, see the through lines of the kind of racist origins of brownsville as unique in comparison to what i'm sure is a not so great history in other mental health hospitals in the state?

well, it's origin story for one. no other hospital in the state of maryland and in my research across the us forced its patients to build it. and i should have said earlier too, you know, this was not patients carrying around some water, helping move sandbags. they were doing backbreaking work, pouring foundations, moving railways, clearing forests while also running and building a highly productive modern irrigated farm and. so and the photographs, the records, the state was actually very proud of this. so they wrote very openly about forcing patients, including ten and 12 year old boys, to be involved. such heavy production and so the the racist beliefs they have about the patients at the time are, very clearly part of the foundation of the institution then and then what we see too is, look, asylums of every kind

in serving every population had serious issues abuse, violence, sexual violence out on the wards and children's accused of poor education. there's one called rosewood in the state of maryland that served white children for a very long time. but what i consistently found is whatever they were doing at those institutions was a lot worse. in brownsville is equivalent. so crown jewel has a children's and adolescence ward and they're supposed to they are required to be running a school for they just choose not to. so rosewood, the poor white institution, has a school council doesn't. so the kids are living out on adult wards, living with patients who've been accused of being insane and they have nothing to do every day. no one's bringing them to a local public school. no one's giving them an education on the grounds and state leaders are even pointing these things out. by the way, in the records. they're noting, well, we still

haven't set up a school. oh, we got a notice about how we don't have a school. you know, this is this was known recognized as in inappropriate and wrong at the and now and so crowns will different at the same time it's not unique because there are other institutions just like brownsville that crop up all over the south, very famous one called central state in virginia and then in other locations, segregated wards of institutions. so sides of a single hospital that were treating their black patients differently than they were their white patients. and so brownsville is both this unique and strange story and its founding is this almost sort of prophetic and like biblical story of these 12 faceless men. but it is also this very american and typical story in terms of the patterns and the similarities to what you see in institutions like it across the south at the time. yeah, yeah. we're going to open it up to audience questions in a second. i had asked antonio, pick out a

couple, one of the things i think really stuck out about the book was, the collection of poems that share from folks who are at brownsville. and i think it creates a real grounding that i think really drives the emotion throughout the book i asked antonia to read a couple of them and then we're going to turn it over to audience questions and you can up by this microphone here if you have one, which you better. so i'll read a couple of poems this is one that a lot of people love, and it's that the very beginning of chapter 12 and this is a poem by a council patient who went by the pseudonym mr. new, written in april of 1952, the new unit was an area of the hospital at the time notorious for overcrowding and abuse of the many male patients who live there. if you get sick, your will, they will bring you to brownsville. but if you're lucky, it won't be long before go. the doctors keep until and there

you'll stay in brownsville. and if they make up their mind, you'll stay there for a long, long time. but when it's time for you to you and everybody will know. and your mission, you'll fulfill. and then you can leave brownsville. but someday, in the sweet by and by you won't have to stay there until you die. just trust in god and you can depend he will bring things to an end. there's another. another poem that i really like we find is second. almost there. so i was talking about the poem hanging in that.

here i where i can find it. yeah, well that for me. i. like this one doesn't have a date but it's from the 1960s spring landscape by patient named phyllis. spring is here. the warm, gentle breezes tell us that. but the most spectacular signs of spring come from the sky above and the earth, like the startled awareness one finds upon coming across the first clump of yellow crocuses and the ready to bloom daffodils and tulips. if you take care, you may notice the different shades of green in the trees and foliage, some yellows, some blue. for me, it brings to mind a song goes something like this in the cold, gray days of december, i will remember the spring when blossoms filled each bow and who can ignore the spring in the morning with all its pinks and

yellow lace at sunrise and the yellow lavender and of an evening sunset. oh, yes, spring is here. oh, oh oh, some folks are gonna line up for some questions. and also, we should give you a hand, like, as doing thankful said. yeah. yeah, go ahead. i thank you so much for all of your years of research input in this out. i did hear you speak on one of the morning shows last week and i think i heard you said say that there was someone who was involved in the community that does a tour or like a memorial tour of the area. can you speak about that? sure. in april, every year, i think this year it's going to be april 20th. there is a ceremony at the cemetery on crown seville's historic land called say my name and the community gathers there.

and they say the names of all of the patients who've been buried there. and it's this really important act of remembrance that's grown year after year because those patients were buried initially, for the most part as a numbers, not names. more than 1700 of them. in fact, in a very sort of disorganized field. and it's when you walk in there, you walk up this hill and it's actually really it's it's stunningly beautiful and very but because stones are so small and sort of tilted down and buried you when you when arrive, you don't even know that you're in the cemetery at first. and so a woman named janice hays williams and a team of volunteers connected to the community there. they hand out the names of patients that they've found in records and they encourage people to share a bit of their stories to, walk around with each other to pay respects at

graves and the county is now promising to build a real memorial site. there so to create an art installation. and they've hired a team of dogs that have come through to mark exactly where everybody is buried, work that could have been done years ago when the hospital shut down hasn't been done until very recently. but there is really just this groundswell of support now and a recognition because not only do they finally have access to these names, but there are families in the annapolis and baltimore areas that have found and trace history back to this institution. and they're looking for people and clues. and so it's a really lovely event where people come and, you can see them kind of searching for their piece of their family history. you can take part in that. oh, thank you? yeah, of course. thank you so much telling those stories of like, invisible stories for people going through psychosis is so powerful.

one of the things that struck me, you said is that there was this brief period where patients receiving help from people that look like them, help from the community. so taking a look at our mental health system now. what are the aspects from when there was that brief period where things were working that were communally centered that you could be implemented now and that people that are alive can help kind of implement. well, i'll tell you what, there is a large community or maybe large isn't the right word. a vibrant community of black doctors. psychiatrists who have been trying to scream from the rooftops about what to change in our mental health care system, the very simple and not very costly steps they'd like to see this take so i can share their perspective with you. the first is that they believe that we need to have treatment centers that actually reflect the communities that they serve and that that would require supporting people going through

medical school and through these very competitive and expensive programs. so creating opportunities that make it both affordable for them, but also not traumatizing, frankly, for them to go through these really exclusive degree programs. and so additional support and sort of the the thinking about how you hire and make sure that your teams in any community in which you open spaces actually reflect the kind of patient population be working with to give additional training in cultural humility. the phrase i often hear them work or use in this work, and so that is not necessary. only what we think of now in, you know, a very hot topic, but in d-i training that you hear people talking about, this is something that humility is emphasis. so this idea that you don't know everything and you can actually learn a lot from your patient. so listen more than you talk at

them and so it's not about making it a big deal that you look exactly like them or that you speak a different first language, but that you approach your work every day with humility and an acknowledgment that you're not always expert and you don't know everything. they would really like to see some of our local and national leaders fight for a sort of reinforcing, operated and re supported system, not for the recreation of these mammoth institutions. as we often hear people call open back up the asylums. that's necessarily what they're calling for, but they would like there to be larger, better funded centers with a specialization. so they would like to see hospitals, say, to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder the same way that you might send somebody to a pediatric oncology center or there are experts in breast cancer who you wouldn't go to for another form of cancer. we should be thinking about the mental health much in the way that we think about the cancer

crisis and, you know, they've been trying to get people to with them and to talk to them. but the thing that they really keeps them from being able to get people, the city to listen to them is that the challenge is so long as. people don't talk about their mental health so long as the stigma and the shame really lingers there. politicians do not see the mentally ill, frankly, as a valuable constituency. a group of people whom they need to serve. and so if we talk more about it and see all of ourselves as implicated in and deeply connected to this, and we all live with the knowledge that we are one life experience away from perhaps needing this care, then we would be valuable constituency, then we would be able get them to take action. of course. hi. hi. my name is bob and thank you for your work. really took my breath away when. i when i first heard about your book because my family moved to

annapolis 1967 when i was 16 and then i spent the next 40 years living in inner county and i lived in sherwood forest for several years, which is right across the street from crown state hospital. so the and you know, during all of my time, you know, living in making relationships in and around the county, you know, this story never came up. and i, you know, i was acquainted with a lot of folks who were connected in different ways through the community. so the the real question is, you know, what what part of this systemic power structure in and around the county or the state of maryland sort of kept everything, you know, below the surface because, like i said, you know, and just conversate with with folks who do who are very embedded in the african-american community in annapolis and here in the county. this has never, ever, you know, come up in some of our you know, heartfelt conversations.

well i think there are a few, you you know, one of the things that a lot of black residents in the area say to me is that there have been these aggressive campaigns in annapolis and more broadly in the area around historic preservation or local battles over what to to fund support locally that have silenced black voices and transformed previously vibrant black communities and neighborhoods in annapolis into i mean, literally in blocks that were 80 or 90% black and turn them almost 100% white. and it's it very hard then for black families who've been pushed out, pushed further away to get anyone to listen to their history, get anyone to preserve their side of story. when these historical preservation fights have happened. so that's one element in which they feel like their neighbors have just made the active choice

to not hear them. and then i think, you know, the other piece is that. there's for a while in the papers in the fifties and sixties, brownsville was actually up all the time. but it's routinely attacked is just something i explore in one of the chapters by a lot of white community members who live nearby. they exaggerate and overemphasize the number of patient escapes they many of the patients there as these very sexually aggressive black men and even when white patients from similar institutions do similar things, they describe their actions in very different terms. and so there's this sort of sensational ism surrounding brownsville for a while, and it creates a lack of trust. so so black community members, black patients stopped speaking to those reporters, they stop, cooperate with papers like the baltimore sun, frankly, because

they just don't believe that brownsville is going to get a fair shake. and then when brownsville does get some kind of shake or discussion often what they see then is local lawmakers or the county executives in the past coming up with solutions, ideas like at one point, they suggest a wall around brownsville or forcing patients get, you know, some kind of like community permission card to even be able to leave, to go a local store. and so, you know, those kinds of things they they build up over time and they kind of create these sort of two psychological experience as two worlds in one county. and so i think that's why you find that so often there were people who just didn't know this was going on because in a lot of ways they were just being purposely shielded from it. yeah, i should have also mentioned, you know, as i said, my family came in 1967, you know, as got older and turned the pages back. annapolis was still very much segregated. you know, i mean it had it had

an african-american high school and elementary schools versus white the churches were segregated. so it was a it was a it was a southern town. it was a very southern town. thank you, marilyn. never joined the confederacy, but had a lot sympathy for it. ally one thing that came through that you just mentioned was also the reliance on the black press that really filled a lot of those gaps. yes, i really it felt like and then like an important piece and you being able to put together that history because as you mentioned, there was good reason for those folks not to trust a lot of the traditional media sources. absolutely and so that's one of my favorite parts of the book was exploring the afro, the baltimore afro-americans archives. they have an unbelievable archive the way just for anyone who was interested in doing their own research and their team is small, but they love to send you their resources and old photographs. and there are so many amazing black marylanders who worked that paper, who fought on behalf

of brownsville patients who published counsel, patients, diaries and perspective is in the paper. there's one of my favorite parts of the book. i got access to a transcript of conversation between a black reporter named elizabeth phillips talking to the state leader of mental health at the time in the forties, battering this man and killing him and getting him to really lay out his racist beliefs and his refusal to integrate the institution. and, you know, he admits on this call basically that he doesn't have any faith that black people have any skill or an ability to treat patients at all. and this would be a complete hassle for him. and he's not interested. but she gets this guy and and it's really of my it was one of my favorite discoveries and sections because she gets some good so yeah you have that to look forward to. hi. i'm two things. one, thank you to you, your family for sharing your stories and starting off as someone who has an immediate family member.

and as a brown person sharing, that and finding people to understand is hard. so to open up your book and see that off the bat was something that i'm just really grateful for. thank you, too. you started off the book talking about polymers, father and i just wanted to know, like, why? like, why did you like start there? because it was interesting. because, like, you didn't give it off. like, this is polymers father. you gave him color, you gave him character, you you gave him life. and in all of things. and so to get to that, i'm like, okay, like and then get to, oh, by the way this is polymer his father one of the biggest civil rights advocates are like why did you start there? and i thought i of course he's a local baltimore but like why why start there? a few reasons. i wanted to bring you into the institution and what it was like for patients in this early period. and there are so few accounts that the fact that william murray's life story is rescued,

it preserved by polley and her memory and her beautiful memoir, which everyone here should read at some point. it it just for me immediately jumped out to me. i think also i was just so struck by the fact that this institution that had been just so under the surface and had so little attention that it had all of these critical ties to black people as influential and amazing as someone like pauli murray and and whenever i talk to people one on one about the research, as i was going, they were shocked that there was such a big that someone like that could have a connection to brownsville or that henrietta lacks his daughter was at brownsville and so i think it was those two things wanting to bring you into those early years, wanting to introduce you to a real person. and also i i'm making an argument in that early part of the book to write that part of

what? bringing black people to brownsville in the first place is, racial trauma and all that. william murray and the murray family is subjected to that. you can't understand his breakdown and his family's decision to send him to place like this without understanding what was going on to a black family in baltimore. this man is educator at a time when people are writing in the paper and writing medical and social science journals that black people don't deserve education, that they are inferior, that they'll never be able to learn. and he's showing up to work every day, fighting against this. and he is, according to his own, being burnt out and exhausted by it and trying to raise his own kids, to have self-worth and self-confidence in world that keeps telling them they don't deserve any. he's exhausted by it. his wife dies in front of him. he's a widowed and left alone. and you know, all of the in

these same years baltimore is passing some aggressive of aggressive laws like the first segregation ordinances that still like the color lines were created in the 19 tens still exist in many ways in cities like annapolis and and so you need to know all of that. and i would argue it's it's incidents like that it's it's patterns that that push black men like like polly murray's dad william murray to the brink that bring them down to a place where they can go from being a celebrated educator to somebody whose life comes to a violent, terrible end at brownsville. and i guess i see that story as as as like when you if you can understand william morris story, you're going to understand and you're going see a lot of what's about to happen in the book, in a way, this has to be our final question. but the good news is that antonio will be signing books where you can not only buy one,

get a book signed, but ask you the question directly. but i think this our final thank you. hi thank you so much for writing this book. i'm really to read it. i work for a disability civil rights organization. when i tell people that, i often hear like, oh, you mean the civil rights of disabled people not thinking of us as a greater of the civil rights movement. when in fact, you alluded to this earlier, ableism and racism are incredibly intertwined. i would love to hear any reflections you have from your research about the intersection of those two things and how you see it blossom and racism. i'm cruel. dual sides. well, they're interconnected. just you said and i think what i see especially in those early decades, is a country that's very discarding people and throwing them away and race and disability are all part of the equation that makes it okay for them. do that.

and so, you know for black americans suffering with mental illness, they're sort of twice -- into dishonored. i right at one point in the book first the black and then they are i mean there are patients at who have physical disabilities who are returned from fighting in wars in the united for the united states and then are suffer denied access to health care and then end up at a place like brownsville. and then there are stories like william murray's. and so i think you really can't understand one without understanding the other. and it's some of parts of the book that i think make that the most clearer are sections about, like elsie lacks, because you see these sort of parallel tracks or stories that happen, right? so i think most people are now familiar with the story. henrietta, a black woman from

baltimore, her cervical cancer cells are taken from her by doctors at johns hopkins, become this immortal and invaluable line that continues to be used by doctors all over the place. today in the family only recently was able to get some from that at the very moment that that is happening henrietta and she's starting to suffer. she sends her daughter elsie brownsville. elsie she is unable to speak. she has mostly communicates in what the family describes, sort of chirps and murmurs. she's described as an idiot medical paperwork at that time and as having epilepsy. and so she goes to council. and while her mother's cells are being taken and used by science, elsie ends up being used by science, too. and they subjected to this horrible, horrible study in which they take 100 children with epilepsy drill into their skulls, pump their skulls full of helium to just get a look at their brains. and it leaves with these

horrible, horribly and coughing up blood for the rest of her life until she dies at 15. they're and so, you know, i race and disability in both of those stories they're completely and i think they still are and disability she often plays a role in decisions around criminality and the way in which black children i mean i speak at one point in the book to to a black black psychiatrist named dr. tammy benton, who in her research has found that like when black children who are suffering with emotional challenges or mental challenges come to emergency rooms in the middle of a crisis, they are dismissed, discredited and turned away. and less than 50% of the time they're able to get ongoing mental health care treatment, even if that's what they really deserve. and so you can't understand, one, without the other and probably about to get cut off by said good but thank you that is

really such a crucial part of the heart. this book to you all. thank you so much for coming out tonight. man, this is a tremendous achievement. let's give it up for antonia