>> howard zinn was an american historian, political scientist and activist. he was an active supporter of the student non-violent coordinating committee during the civil rights movement and wrote "vietnam the logic for withdrawal" and "disobedience and democracy." his book "the people's history of the united states" has sold over a million copies since it was published in 1980. howard zinn died of a heart attack in santa monica, california, wednesday, january 27. he was 87 years old.

howard zinn was also guest on book tv's in depth program in september of 2002. you can wash it online at book tv.org. >> psychiatry professor jonathan metzi argues that the increased finding of the rates of schizophrenia in black men was fab crate indicated during the 1960's and 1970's to undermine the civil rights movement. the university of ann arbor hosts the talk. >> it's so nice and so wonderful for me to be able to start this whole process and start this release. the book just came out two days ago in this community, i owe so much gratitude and thanks to so many of the people in this room, ann herman and the women's studies department, carol and erwig, i'm also honored that two

of the really excellent research associates and assistant that worked with me on the project, sarah and sasha are here, so it's really, really wonderful for me to start the project and start the public recognition for all of us is a private process over a series of years in this particular manner. of before i get started, i'll also say that i'm also grateful to the state archives of michigan, because before this project was anything, it was an archival project. i was looking around for a very kevin project from the one that i ended up writing about. i was interested in the institutionalization and race in michigan and was really looking for any hospital records in michigan, because so many hospital records have been destroyed at this point, along with the actual -- the former state hospitals themselves. and stumbled upon an archivist at the state archives, mark harvey, who really helped me uncould have what had previously been an unseen archive of this

ionia state hospital archive and started to look at this process of what happened in this hospital hover the course of time. now, again, initially, i wasn't starting, even focusing on schizophrenia, but what particularly interested me and i'll be getting to it in about 30 minutes towards the end of this talk, but what particularly interested me in this archive is ionia had been largely a white midwestern hospitals in the early 1930's, 1940's, and 1950's and many people in the hospital diagnosed with schizophrenia happened to be 30 or 40% of the hospital were women from the rural areas who had been arrested for different problems like shoplifting or disturbing the peace, they came and did all of these arts and crafts, it was a very kind of low stress environment. all of a sudden in the 1950's, 1960's and early 1970's, the demographic of the hospital shifted quite radically, and what started to happen was that

groups of african-american men, largely from detroit were shipped up, paddy wagoned up to the hospital, and these men became the largest demographic group of the hospital and also these were the men who became schizophrenia in a particular way, so all of a sudden the demographic of who was being diagnosed with schizophrenia shifted within the course of this institution and really that was the opening question for me. how was it we got to this point where schizophrenia became an illness that so radically shifted in the confines of this hospital from one group to another, and what happened over the next four, five, or 15 or 20 years, or however how long you end up researching and writing about a particular project was that i came to see this hospital as encompassing a series of much larger issues that really are at the intersection of race, psychiatry, and culture, played

out over the course of this very charged time period, and really, in a way this hospital was on one hand, a very important local story, and at the same time, a metaphor for a very different kind of really civil rights history, what was happening in this hospital away from the national glare, away from, you know, boy cots and sit-ins and television cameras certainly. there was something else very much happening in response to civil rights, but it was a very silent story, so in the book i try to tell that story. but let me start with some of the larger questions. i mentioned that i feel like this project actually ties into some of the bigger questions at the nexus of race and psychiatry, and what i'll do over the course of this talk is just address some of these bigger questions, as a way of then getting back to the archives that i was just talking about, and so let me start with a kind of rhetorical question, which is, what is schizophrenia? as carol just mentioned, i'm someone who has a split appointment at this university,

i spend part of my time in the psychiatry -- and a split mind of course, spend part of my time in the psychiatry department and spend part of my time here, and parliament of my time playing basketball, and so if you ask me on the days where i'm over if the psychiatrist department, what is psychiatry, you would get an answer that is related to some of the issues on this particular slide, which is to say that if you ask me on a monday or tuesday afternoon when i'm over in clinic or ask any of my colleagues in the psychiatry department, you would hear from them or from me that psychiatry is a biological illness that causes certain particular simeon -- symptoms and those symptoms include delusions, hallucinations -- yes. >> i think you mean schizophrenia is, not psychiatry is. >> that was an audience

participation moment. anyway. no, this is the straw man moment of the talk, so thank you for pointing that out. so anyway, at those moments, people would say that schizophrenia is an illness that causes a louis, delusions, -- hallucinations, and are caused by different types of brain anomalies in relation to cultural variance but if you look in scientific literature, you'll see different kinds of theories about what is held to be the biological basis of this illness, everything from brain size to function findings to neurotransmitters and one particular biological finding that's been present actually in psychiatric textbooks, at least as far as i can tell for the past 25 years, is this assumption basically that because of biology or because of genetics, schizophrenia is an

illness that occurs in 1% of the world's population, or one out of everyone hundred people and it really shouldn't matter where you go, who you talk to, what kind of area you're in, irregardless of gender, race, social class, schizophrenia is an illness that should occur in 1% of the world's population, so that's the buy lodge part of this talk. let me say that on the other hand, the material lives of people living with schizophrenia and particularly men with schizophrenia are shaped by cultural perceptions, cultural factors that are seemingly at odds with a great deal of scientific research, and the -- i want to highlight two of these pick cultural variances today and one is the so-called misdiagnosis literature, the literature that basically says, that if you are an african-american man in the united states, this 1% number, you can pretty much pitch it out the window, because if you're a black man living in the united

states, the chance that you'll be diagnosed or what the literature argues is overdiagnosed with schizophrenia is about five to seven times greater than any other demographic group, and actually, this is a finding that i'll say if a minute has been very consistent, some of the it comes from the university of michigan, but if you're a black man in the united states basically, you're five to seven times more likely to be overdiagnosed with schizophrenia and also equally to be underdiagnosed with a condition such as depression or anxiety disorder or bipolar disorder. so cultural point number one, there's a seeming tension here between what we might call the genetic arguments about schizophrenia and what happens when you add race to the mix in the real world. a second point and one that i'll go into, somewhat tangentially, a related argument, not so much related to the biological findings of schizophrenia, but

there also a great number of studies that basically show that schizophrenia in cultural perception is also an illness that's not just racialized in a particular way, it's also assumed to be a particularly violent disorder, and so this is actually a study by watson, corrigan that appeared in psychiatric services several years ago, where they gave 382 police officers a series of vignettes will different kinds of altercations and in one altercation they said there's a guy named bob, he gets into a fight with sam, bob pushes sam, they get to to an argument, you're called to the scene, what do you do, and in vignette number two, it's there's a guy named bob who has schizophrenia, he gets into a fight with a guy namedsome. possible pushes sam, you're called to the scene, what do you do? so the same seemingly minimally violent vignette. all they did was add the word schizophrenia to this vignette and what they found was that police officers' perceptions that the person who was the

perpetrator of this incident as being violent, feeding some kind of restraint, needing some kind of incarceration, went from something like 15 or 19% to upwards of 60%, simply by adding this one word, schizophrenia, in other words, just by adding this one word, the perception of violence, the perception of threat expanded greatly and unless you think this is a finding that's just related to the police, the study has actually been repeated most notably by sociologists at columbia and what they do is look at popular attitudes and show the same thing that if you add the word schizophrenia to these vignettes, people's perceptions of violence raise exponentially. now let me just say about the two findings, schizophrenia, i realize that they are topics of controversy and that's why i've taken them on, but there's a very important point here which is that they're largely disproven by pretty much most

research. and so definitely, there is no racial basis for schizophrenia, in fact, the whole idea of biological psychiatry is to get beneath the level of race to the level of chemicals and brain structures and structures that are seemingly the same in all persons, and also, this stereotype of the persons with schizophrenia as being violent actually, i mean, there are con founding factors such as substance abuse, but for me, the most important study that disproves this actually was a study by john becky and kathy principalle at the usc school of social work that looked at actual police contact over a five-year period in los angeles, and what they actually found was that if you're diagnosed with schizophrenia in the united states, your chance of actually getting the crap beaten out of you by somebody else is about 65% to 135% greater than the general population. in other words, the stereotype is directly at odds with what's

happening, and this probably makes sense, that if we think that people with schizophrenia are somehow withdrawn or deluded or talking to themselves in a way, so it wasn't that these people were running down the street with a sawed of off shotgun or a beg hammer ready to swing it. it was actually the opposite was the case, so the question is, first of all, what is going on here, and second of all, why is it that we can't just fix this problem? now, being, the things that i've just told you are things that are very well known in the psychiatric community and we've tried a series of interceptions from training and objective disease criteria to something i'll talk about toward the end here, training in cultural competency, training to be more culturally sensitive or aware, public information campaigns and still these factors persist profoundly in the present day. and so the question is why? and this is where i come in, and wherwear my other hat, not onlya

psychiatrist but a cultural historian and what i was mentioning in the introduction to the talk what is really interesting for me, i feel that one thing you want to say as a historian is that actually it hasn't always been this way, that actually, it's not always been the case through recorded time that there was this misdiagnosis in literature or that this particular stigma at thissization of people with schizophrenia are violent. if you look across medical and scientific popular literature is that many of the factors, many of the findings that i just told you emerged in the 1960's. just for one -- as one example, misdiagnosis literature first appeared in about 1964, 1965. and has been consistent in the scientific literature ever since. and so i think that that's point number one is really that what i try to argue in the book is that these findings, it's not surprising to me that they've been so resistant to interventions in the present day, because of course, they are

extreme stigmaization that impact people's material lives very deeply, but there are historical remnants and what i believe is we need to address and need to explore the racial history of schizophrenia itself, in order to understand how it is that things got to be this way. and so that's basically what i do in the book, i tell three overlapping stories. one is about a shift in popular perceptions of schizophrenia that happens to my mind between 1940 and 1980, across a series of medical and popular sources. the second aspect of the book then is telling how that cultural shift impacted the lives of patients at the ionia state hospital for the criminally insane and in the third part of the book i finish with is addressing the ways in which understanding the cultural history of schizophrenia might help us readdress or reengage with issues of race and

psychiatry, and so what i want to do over the next bit of this talk is just give you a few snippets of those particular arguments, so let me say, some people might have been thinking when i was talking, there of course are stereotypes of madmen as being violent or raised or insane that go back through recorded time and it's definitely not the case that those just appeared on the present day but what was interesting to me in researching the history of schizophrenia was actually that the stereotype of schizophrenia as being an illness of violence actually emerged quite recently in an air america medical history because there was an illness in the united states called dementia precox, but if you look at early representations of schizophrenia, a term that didn't come to the united states until the 1920's, sometimes early 1930's from europe, you see that early representations of the illness actually are the

opposite of what they might seem today, so one place, if you just look at american popular culture, that schizophrenia was very often talked about, was in relation to genius. this is an article from the "new york times," from 1935, and basically, the article argued, as many articles did at the time, that there were great white men, novelists, poets, creative sorts, different kinds of artists and these men had some schizophreniaic traits and they were all touched by a particular trait of schizophrenia, if you want to win this word out at a cocktail party, grand elegance, they talked in exaggerated language and that was their schizophrenia, so schizophrenia was offer a line towards genius. people who talked about schizophrenia or precox said it's a condition found in a reclusive person who has been

the model of behavior in childhood. there were articles from popular magazines like ladies home journal from the 1940's and unanimous 50's that invited lower middle class white persons who invite other assumed white persons in to their home, persons with schizophrenia, as boarders, so they could cook dinner for them. schizophrenia was also a very common town in women's bags, for people who know the history of this word, schizophrenia literally means split minds and the magazines would basically argue that we have a split, we women, between cooking and cleaning and being goodwives and taking care of our children and it's driving us all a little bit crazy and so you would see schizophrenia come up very often in relation to women's domestic work and of course, this was a theme that played out probably most famously in the 1948 olivia dehavilland film "the snake pit." has anyone seen the film?

i know lisa has seen it because she's taken my last. an interest film, because it hammers home some of the points i'm trying to make which is schizophrenia and illness is seen as the illness of a woman who was living on her own, living a successful career as a journalist and makes the fateful mistake of getting married basically and three days into her marriage, she doesn't recognize her husband, her husband comes home, she's acting a little crazy, something like that, and so what happens is that she starts to go nuts. they take her to the asylum, and they do all of the psycho analysis on her and every 20 minutes or so they bring the husband back into the movie and they're like who is this dude and she's like, i have no idea, and that keeps happening, keeps happening, until she has a psycho analytic break through, i'm sorry to ruin the movie for anybody, but basically, she

realizes it's all about her father, they bring the husband back in, who is this dude and she's like darling, i love you, they embrace, they leave the hospital, they go into suburban reproductive bliss, so in a way, the stereotype of schizophrenia of being a white women's illness was, even though this movie was path breaking in many ways, hammered home to the american populace by this film. this movie appeared in many pharmaceutical advertisements, this is an early farm site calmics advertisement from the early 1950's, and what you can see here, this is not some angry raised person on the loose. these are schizophreniaic women who are suturing away their symptoms with the help of anti-psychotic medications. in no way am i making the argument here that all persons diagnosed with an illness called schizophrenia in the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, were members of a category of called wife, and

in fact, if you just go by the numbers, the majority of -- i mean, there were southern, so-called negro hospitals where schizophrenia was the only diagnosis given to every single person in the entire hospital, so i'm not saying that this was exclusively a white illness. what i'm saying is if you look at american popular culture over this same time period, in the early part of 20th century, you would actually not quite recognize that, because schizophrenia very much was coated as an illness of the white mainstream and sometimes as of the white feminine mainstream. now, let's jump forward to the 1950's, 1960's, and 1970's and i'll say that basically everything high told you about schizophrenia pretty much goes out the window if the 1960's, so what we see in american popular and american medical representations is a very dramatic shift in assumptions about who gets schizophrenia and why and this is actually a

snippet, an image from a 1963 samuel fuller film called "shock corridor." anybody here seen this particular film by any chance? lisa of course. so those of you who have seen it know that it's really -- it's an interesting movie for many reasons, i won't today speak about the pan getting trapped on the nympho ward, but people who are b classic films should see this movie, but what's important in this movie is the character with schizophrenia all of a sudden shifts in terms of race and gender. the main schizophreniaic character in the film is this meant trent played by harry rhodes, who himself has been a civil rights activist, he was a college school desegregated, and because of the pressures of participating in civil rights, because of the pressures of what he was trying to do, change society, in a way, society drove him crazy and it drove him so

crazy that in fact, what he becomes is a racist, and he starts a race riot against the negroes on the ward so this very interesting turn of events, where in this film, it was billed as the followup to the snake pit, all of a sudden, we see a dramatic shift in the race and gender of who gets schizophrenia, but also, this very important theme that participating in civil rights is the causal factor that causes insanity. now also in the 1960's and 19 70's, you see other cultural representations, that something that there are new forms of schizophrenia, there are f.b.i. 10 post wanted business lists that are very widely reproduced in american newspapers that all basically talk all of a sudden about this new category, raised black schizophrenic character who is on the loose. at the same time, you also see increasing numbers of comparison studies in leading psychiatric and scientific journals whereas before, the majority, though not all, but the majority of

psychiatric articles had been -- the research had been conducted in white only wards, all of a sudden you see increasing numbers of desegregated wards or studies like this one that compare white and negro and allegedly forms of schizophrenic illness and in many of the studies, people are saying, well, maybe there are two kinds of schizophrenia, a cerebral kind of schizophrenia or a bodily form that causes bodily acts or bodily aggression in a particular way and so the second question i want to ask is what happened, how is it that these representations, these assumses about schizophrenic illness shifted so dramatically in such a short period of time. in the book, i give three explanations, three what i feel are causal explanations for this shift. i'm only going to talk about one of them today but let me say one of the key issues that i won't address today is that actually schizophrenia becomes a troupe

that is not just top down model coming down from white society. schizophrenia is a troupe, a metaphor that is actually taken up in the civil rights discourse itself so in the book i talk about seven or eight of martin luther king's sermons, where he actually uses schizophrenia as a metaphor to talk about how there is a deboysan split in the black mind between good and evil, between violence and non-violence and we should choose the path of non-violent resistance and conversely, schizophrenia also became a troupe, a metaphor, times a live reality talked about in black power circles, also places like negroes with guns, williams' famous book where he talks at length about schizophrenia, malcolm x talks about schizophrenia and books most famously like black rage that make arguments that schizophrenia basically is an illness that's not caused by a defect in the black mind, it's caused by living in a

particularly racist society. so that's one place the definition of schizophrenia is changing. but the point i want to talk about today in terms of where that is actually that i do feel also that certain troupes from within black power, from within the civil rights era and particularly the civil rights era of the late 1960's, played out and reflected in and to my mind, impacted psychiatric discourse. so for people familiar with this history, you know that probably the second wave of the civil rights era was a moment in which there were two largely competing camps, people advocating non-violent resistance and other types of arguments basically saying that non-violence had had its end point and we should fight back at this particular moment. and it's somewhat of an understatement to say that this latter school of thought in civil rights appeared throughout psychiatric literature and particularly in pharmaceutical tiesments and i'll just give a few examples. the title of my book, the

protest psychosis, actually comes from an archive of general psychiatry article from 1968, in which two new york psychiatris psychiatrists, bromberg and simon, basically had been working in new york psychiatric hospitals, and what they saw was a new kind of patient coming into the psychiatric emergency ward, and the psych particular wards more broadly. these were men who came in, having changed their names to islamic names they say, came in with the physical signs of the clenched fists, and i'll just read from their article. they say, this particular symptomology we have observed, for which the term protest psychosis is suggested, is influenced by social pressures, the civil rights movement, dips into religious doctrine, the black muslim group, is guided in content by african subcultural ideologies, and is colored by a denial of caucasian values and hostility thereto. this protest psychosis is virtually a repudiation of white

civilization, so i think that that kind of brings home the point i was making before, that basically, this is one of the probably two most important psychiatric journals in the country, and in 1968, they were saying that participating in sill rights movements, or feeling like your civil rights were being violated, which is a theme that shows up in other articles, is itself a causal factor that appears again and again, so basically, participating in civil rise, is itself a causal pack are tore in the genesis of a particular form of psychosis or schizophrenia. now, to say that this theme appeared with a vengeance in a pharmaceutical advertisement would be something of an understatement. i mentioned before that there were african themes that played out, both within the republic of new africa and other kind of movements themselves, but also in this literature and you see, these are tiesments from the american journal of psychiatry, from the same time period, advertisements for major tranquilizers and the 19 60's

all of a sudden shifted from these sewing white women to these african subcultural themes that appeared to my mind directly reflect what was happening in the country. some of these ads again from the late nations leading psychiatric journals actually used words that people who study the anthropology of these particular terms could be seen as problem matically racially charged and what i talk about at length in the book is an ad that appeared in the early 1970's, in the archives of general psychiatry, an advertisement for the anti-psychotic medication haldol, i could go on for another hour about this particular advertisement. i'll just say it's happening at the same time period all of these issues. this is a man who looks not ironically like james brown, who had an f.b.i. file at the time. he had an f.b.i. file at the time. i don't think it was a mistake. he's shaking his fist at the physician viewer in what you could think as a kind of

inserted black power kind of thing, but instead of making a political statement, it's threatening the viewer. >> probably around the same time that vietnam, i'm black and i'm proud. >> absolutely. also, you can tell it's orange on this page, maybe a bit hard to see here, but also appearing in an urban scene. it doesn't appear to be at least from my reading in a psychiatric hospital and so of course, this is also the same time period that the detroit riots, newark, other things are happening in the united states, and so what i feel like what is happening here is there is this conflation of a social -- and assaultive and belligerent cooperation begins with hall done the -- haldol the ad tells us. those are some of the more obvious shifts of what is happening in the 1960's. i'll also say there are two other key shifts that i'll blow through and maybe conclude in five or sex minutes and then the

response -- six minutes and then begin the response. at the same period for reasons i don't think were expressionly volitional, the diagnosis of schizophrenia changes. the dsm-1 had came out in the early 1950's and that text defines schizophrenia largely as a personality condition that was aligned much more with the split mind that i was talking about before. all of a sudden in 1968, the d dsm-ii comes out and the definition of paranoid schizophrenia in particular adds some words to my mind that are very important. it tells viewers that the person with schizophrenia is hostile and aggressive or has a hostile and aggressive attitude and has this problem called projection, which is basically, thinking about where we were at before, blaming other people for your problems and it went on to use the universal male pronoun, which had hadn't been doing before and says the patient's attitude is frequently hostile

and aggressive, uses the mechanism of projection, which adescribes to others characteristics he cannot accept in himself. actually, high tracked down some of the people who worked on the dsm-ii and i've talked to them in the book and i don't think they were saying this is what we were doing is we were pathologying a particular moment, i don't think that's what they were saying, but through work that sarah and i have done here, we have actually tracked the use of these particular terms in scientific late tour and what we found was that in the 1960's, at around exactly the same time that this is happening, there are real spikes, if you do studies that talk about either white persons with schizophrenia or race and identified persons with schizophrenia, versus articles that talk about what we saw before, negro schizophrenia, we basically went through the american journal of psychiatry and several other leading psychiatric journals and what you see is starting in the 1960's, we compared the first set of articles random to tests which were the articles that

talked about african-americans and you see that there's a dramatic rise, particularly in these terms, in ways that probably were intentional, but that were giving a language to talk about race to our mind in a way of talking under the guise of schizophrenia so the lats part of culture is taking the history and applying it to archived medical charts. in the very beginning i was saying i got files from the ionia state hospital for people who used the scientific mitten method, that's about right there and even though there's not much of the complex remains in this form today, this is actually a very large hospital, 450 acres were the grounds in the 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's, about 50 of those acres were large gothic stone buildings and the rest was farmlands where people with mental illness could work out if a bavarian summer camp type of way their particular forms of mental illness.

if you drove up from the road in whatever kind mobile you were in, this is what it looked like, and as i was saying before, carts from the earlier part of the 20th century and particularly charts of people with schizophrenia, some of whom i talk about in the book, are much more in line with some of the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's cultural documents i talked about, so you see a lot of women. it was allegedly a desegregated hospital at the time, but if you look at the hospital census, it was about 95% people identified as u.s. whites. and there were a series of women with schizophrenia who i talk about in the book, who were in a way, kind of public figures for the hospital, they did arts and crafts, they were very widely sold me michigan state fair, there was a big market in these particular crafts. every year, they had a float in the michigan state fair parade, where ionia schizophrenic women would go down the thing waving

to people. you probably wouldn't see that kind of float in the present day, but at that time, this was a very particular kind of thing. all of a sudden, in the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, for a variety of economic, social, political reasons, the demographic and the architecture of the hospital changes. at this time, as i was saying, and these are actually the slides i was mentioning before to c-span that we will not be panel to show on television, because they do show patient, but the demographic of the hospital shifts. increasing numbers of men, particularly african-american pen from detroit -- men from detroit, increasing number of moats and barbed wire, security because increasing problem for the hospital and in 1977, the i've own i can't state hospital becomes the riverside correctional facility, a medium security prison in michigan that actually was transferred last year, but about that facility closed, i actually got to spend

a considerable amount of time develops it's the hospital itself and went on some tours and i talk about in the book, really, the aesthetics of what people remember and what happens when a hospital becomes a prison, which is a transition that we've seen on a much broader scale in this country. now, just finally, i'll say that we did exactly the same kind of analysis of these charts as we did in the scientific literature, and we found basically the same thing, that those terms that i was talking about before, aggression, hostility, projection, overwhelmingly become used to talk about these new types of patients, that are showing up in ionia and to justify particular forms of incarceration. so i'll just say if conclusion that the book that i've written, it's now out in the world, out in the hall, examines the ways in which assumptions about race, but also in totally invisible ways becomes structured into the ways that we think about schizophrenia in american

society, and that that changes the way we think about the role of psychiatry in relation to the role of politics, and what i argue is that actually, findings like the one i told you about before, are really discourses of remnants, remnants that very often are not explicitly related to race, so for example in the stigma articles, they very often argue what we need to do when we find the police officers that think people with schizophrenia are violent, what we need to teach them is schizophrenia is an illness with a biological basis and i am all for this. but at the same time if you look at the history of this stigmaization, it's also racially derived, so i argue at these moments of education, we might also bring up the matter of race as well. i also have a long part of the book, where i talk about the remnants, i was talking before about how i feel like schizophrenia was a particular protest identity in black power discourse, and i don't think that that trajectory died off

totally and i have a long bit of -- one of the final chapters where i talk about the troupe of schizophrenia if rap and hip-hop music. i apologize to the memory of tupac, whose words should never appear on a pour point slide in -- power point slide in academic literature and are certainly not censored, except to say there are a number of rappers and hip-hop artists who say i have a biological defect in my brain but to say yeah, i'm violent and that's my survival mechanism. so it's a use of schizophrenia that doesn't make sense, why is this term showing up in hip-hop, unless it has this historical trajectory in my mind. i also talk in the conclusion of the book about our efforts to destigmatize schizophrenia are very often well intentioned, but

are not explicit in a conversation about race. so one thing people might be familiar with, "a beautiful mind," but basically for people who want to watch the film, it is an important film about mental illness, it's mrs. a film that -- also a film that to my mind in terms of history has a white nostalgia, this film is actually a film where a person of color, we watched it in our class, doesn't show up in the movie until i think it was four minutes to go exactly, four, three and a half, an african-american professor gives nash a pen and says the two words spoken by a person of color, congratulations, john, but other than that, this is a film that's embedded in a much earlier notion of schizophrenia, one that you talked about before as being associated with the 1930's and 19 40's, of this particular form of white genius. now, again, i think that's particularly important, but i also think it's important to note that there are very important stories about race and schizophrenia that are told that don't get made into ron howard

movies, such as an excellent book, victor labelle's "the ecstatic," victor laval leading psychiatric journals was once misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and he writes about what it means to be misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and to be a large plaque man in the united states. fantastic story. might further our national conversation not just about schizophrenia but some of the aspects i've been talking about today. two other final points, i mentioned before, cultural competency and medical education efforts, very, very important. but my critique of these is that they very often talk about race in a particular way. they assume that race means either the race of the doctor or the patient understandably and talk about how we can fix racial attitudes in that way, but what cultural competency very often overlooks is the history i've been telling you today, the ways in which racial assumptions, that there's a third race that

functions if the examination room, not jules the doctor and patient, actually the diagnosis itself as a particular race, so i would like to think of some particular way of addressing that as well, the racial history of the disease and finally the story i've been telling you is also a story about the criminalization of mental illness. people know from human rights watch in the present day, if you live in a psychiatric institution or a state institution, the present day, it's about four to five times to one that you're going to show up in a prison as opposed to a psychiatric care facility. there are many reasons why this of course transformation has taken place, but if you went to somebody in the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's and say we put people with schizophrenia in a prison, they would look at you like you were the crazy person, like no, these are children, we take care of them and tears been this shift towards thinking about schizophrenia as a violent disorder that justifies this particular transformation. so i will stop there. thank you very much.

[applause] >> you might want to hang on to this one for your responses. >> because of the taping, we have this little artificial for conversation. i'm angela dillard, i'm a professor at the center for african-american studies and afro studies at the residential college and a very proud colleagues of colleague of jonathan metzl and very excited to be here today reproduce to some extent part of the conversation we had that was an interview i did with jonathan that was then condensed down and published in the december issue of black detroit magazine, that's blac detroit magazine, as an independent publication in detroit run by a fairly young woman, that a number of us on campus have been supporting respond pitching in here and there.

i've been waiting for this book for a while now. well, month that jonathan was slow, but postally because -- because of the intersection between it and my own struggle to understand the political life of james meredith, who went from being a major icon of theself rights movement for successfully desegregating the university of mississippi in 1962, to serving on the staff of conservative north carolina senator jesse helms and campaigning in the early 1990's david duke, actions that got him labeled crazy in both time periods. no sane black person in narrative goes would ever tried to enroll at old miss unless he was crazy and in fact, the man who tried a few years before james meredith was committed to the state asylum for his actions. so the idea of a protest psychosis is certainly one of interest to me as a scholar.

it's also interesting because i grew up in and have done work on detroit, especially around this black protest culture. so the idea of black men who had engaged if aggressive, non-conformist, politically resistant behavior, being shipped off to this facility in high own i can't, remains incredibly compelling to me. as jonathan puts it at one point in the book, "detroit burned, ionia transformed." so i have some followup questions for jonathan, retrace a bit of what we heard because a lot of it is really difficult to digest and there's some things i think if he retraces a pit for us, especially those of us who are non-specialists, not psychiatrists, that that would be helpful. some of the other questions ask him to reflect a little bit on other directions. i hope they'll be useful for framing a larger discussion once we open things up, so i some questions and john that will

just respond. i won't take up too much time, because i know people have a lot of questions that they want to get on the floor. the first one i have though is one of those kind of by way of retracing some of this narrative. so jonathan, can we pick up on what you mean when you say the meaning of schizophrenia changed? you're really careful to emphasize in the book that schizophrenia is not just a social or political construct, but an actual condition that affects the lives of families and hopes and futures of the afflicted, but at the same time you argue that the condition became increasingly identified with black men. in response to some extent to the social upheavals spurred by the civil rights protests and the rise of black power. so is it possible to distinguish the reality of the condition from the diagnostic culture associated with it? >> do you have all the questions?

>> no, why don't i just do one by one. >> absolutely. that's great. so i would say that, you know, it's hard because there always is this tension between -- basically, there's a tension of doing cultural history i would say so on one hand, we get in to people who have taken my class know i'm totally opposed to saying it's either socially constructed or it's real, which i think is the fall back position we have a lot of times. what i push people to do who are managing sort of the construction arguments is to say ok, there's an illness here being shaped by social and political forces but that doesn't divorce it from having profound deeper impacts on the material lives of people in a way, and so what i tried to do in the book is actually be really sensitive, really aware to not saying, on one hand, you know, this illness is false, which i do not believe to be the case, and also, that because there are social forces at play

here, that the suffering of particular people is somehow inauthentic, because they're suffering from a socially constructed illness or something like that, and i feel like actually, that does a disservice to what's actually happening here, which is that these social and political shifts shift in, as i say, the meaning and the association of the illness. actually have tremendous, tremendous consequences for the lives of real people, and as i show in the book there. now, if there is an issue here and a challenge, it's to myself, and sciatics and people in psychiatry and i do feel like the pendulum is flowing back, but at the height of what might be called the biological movement in psychiatry, there was a move to basically say because we have excellent brain scans and emerging medications and issues like that, that we don't have to look at the social and cultural forces in a particular way, because we know a bit more about serotonin or

dopamine and i feel it helps you get at the ways that illnesses like this not only transform in meaning and association but also are both and i think that's an important point, particularly for psychiatry. >> i wanted to start with a question in particular, because one of the really wonderful things about the book is the kind of care that jonathan uses in writing about the kind of real individuals whose stories kind of are woven through the various chapters, so along the way we get to meet real people who are at ionia, who had real problems, as he tells this larger story. but another question i have for you is whether or not this diagnostic culture in a way that it sort of shot through assumptions about race whether or not it's another instance of drapetomania, which is an

antebellum condition that caused slaves to run away from their masters, so you know, if you did this, you had this illness, all right. it was actually diagnosed in the 1850's, to put it other way, is the story that you're telling, just a more row sent example of a long-standing historical phenomenon? >> well, i think there's a wax an wane, so i'll just say a couple things about this particular point. i actually opened the book with a discussion of what is called drapetomania, there was a second illness, these were terms that were actually promoted, starting in about the 1860's, first by a surgeon named cartwright in the united states and basically the illness was, in a word, freedom, that basically, what he was saying, was that african-american slaves who ran away from their captors, from their masters, were doing so because of an illness called drapetomania and what was happening was basically, there were all tease arguments that

the black mind was not fit for the pressures of freedom, actually, the more natural psychological state was servitude or incarceration and the people running away must be raised, treat this like an illness. this idea got a lot of play in early psycho analytic culture in the early 20th century and balances rightly and roundly critiqued within psychiatry and from outside of psychiatry as basically, pathologyizing something that turned out wasn't a mental illness, so part of the rhetoric of schizophrenia itself, so on one hand, i would say that i don't think this is exactly the same case, even to n though there is a much larger history of pathologyizing mental i will fess and what was interesting about schizophrenia, this term came in the aftermath. it was coming from europe, it was sig scientific, it was basen

bluaranian science and in a way, the implications themselves were i think quite different. at the same time i would also say if you look at the bigger picture of pathologyizing to the state or to the financial structure of the state as mental illness, that's not just a drapetomania story, we think of that in terms of of the soviet union or tiananmen square, so there is a particular version of this story that still needs to be explored. >> i'm going to attack slightly the other way and go back to what you were saying about some of the language of race and protest and mental illness also comes from within the brach power movement, with, for instance, the idea of black rage, as a product of living in a racist and oppressive society. there's instances of black rage even being used in court cases. there's one particularly famous

one that comes out of detroit, a man who walks into the auto plant where he works, and shoots at least two people, one of whom his foreman is killed and he's defended by two black radical attorneys in detroit who are associated with the league of revolutionary black workers. if you want a quick history of this in an interesting way, it shows up in heather thompson's detroit, who's detroit, and it's a fascinating case. i wonder if you want to say por about those kinds of uses of race and this notion about illness, which would seem to come from the other side. >> so you're talking about actually coming in to the popular domain or -- >> yeah. as an actual defense of actions. >> right. right. i definitely, as i was trying to say, i only do it in a tiny way here. there were certain issues that get very short shreft in this talk. i was just getting back to your first question, biological

psychiatry, throughout the course of the reef search on schizophrenia, people have argued that there's a confluence of developmental, cultural, social factors in addition to biological, and so i have oversimplified that and hopefully don't do that too badly in the book and secondly is this idea of what's the relationality between the cultural politics of the civil rights movement and what's being understood as schizophrenic illness, so the one financing i did produce evidence for here is actually that the voice of protest, the language of protest is being coopted, sometimes like in that pharmaceutical advertisement, in incred bring explicit ways, sometimes in unconscious ways. that rhetoric is being coopted in a you what of creating new categories of schizophrenic illness. the angry black protesting pan and in a way, they're using this language and coopting it, and it's not quite a volitional

process and that language is not being used if a boardroom by saying how can we market haldol in an effective way. this filters in and is rearticulated in the book and i look at the term schizophrenia in the black american press and look at the ways there is this flow or people are trying to redefine schizophrenia and there as you say, the illness is not so much there's a biological defect if our brain. the illness is being caused by racist society and there's a long trajectory of that.

is this story as much about alice and women like her as it is about the black men associated with civil-rights and black power? >> i reproduced in the book some of the examples from the chart and the meaning of illness. and the reek coating of particular patients. prior to the 1916s these men were across the board diagnosed -- all these specifications for

that. as this diagnostic language comes out it is hard to imagine but the day before microsoft word and computers and things like that, they couldn't read type the entire chart. so they go through the diagnosis. the patient was recounted as schizophrenia, paranoid tight. into a very different category. as this happens the women i showed from these slides and a lot of these women are themselves recast and what you see, there is a historian who works on this issue, and emergence of a larger category of depression which wasn't an earlier category -- a lot of the cases of these women, this

person's symptoms have not changed. she is doing the same thing she has been doing. she is recast as melancholy depression and these women were invariably released from the hospital. there is a literal rico and that happens under the age. >> women like alice wilson and a number of black men. the case file you are reading as you go along in the book, really deeply affecting. their families are involved, they are trying to get them out in it is quite moving. you get a number of blacks men. what about black women? >> there is invisibility of african-american women based on the particular archived i am looking at which is -- this is a hospital which in the early part of the twentieth century, thirty-five% women and over the

course of time as this narrative plays out it becomes a predominantly male institution. it is not a huge surprise that african-american women and women in general disappear from this particular narrative but also in terms of a larger cultural story of what is happening here the angry protesting black man character that emerges doesn't leave tons of space for talking about black women. she works on black women's depression. basically, black women suffer violence or these particular forms of protest are not seen as threatening in a particular way. i tried to engage with that a bit. that would be an interesting follow-up project. what i was continually impressed by was even in the -- where are

the angry women who capture you and go on with their day. >> let me get one more question in and hope it doesn't become too many things. the actual people who are talked-about in such detail and care also the overlay of popular culture, there's the story of physical space itself. what it looks like in the early period where if you were criminally insane you needed space.

you needed fresh air. you get a sense of the kind of land and openness of the place. as it goes through the history jonathan traces will involve, the institutional is asian is one thing you didn't talk a lot about. you might want to say a little bit more about that. as the state gets rid of these facilities, what happens to the actual structure that it becomes a prison? at the same time as jonathan mentioned, the people diagnosed with this disease gets and not to a hospital but a prison. the transformation of the land

is so remarkable, one part of the question invites you to say more about that because it was such a compelling issue in the book. the other thing i would like you to say a little bit more about is your critique of recent attempts among psychiatrists and other professionals to increase levels of sensitivity and cultural confidence. for me as a reader this was surprising. you think of those as being good things. what you want is for people to be more culturally sensitive especially if you are trying to keep people with mental illness out of prison which is the intersection of the swamp. i wanted to say a little more about your critique of that movement within that side of your profession.

could you offer some suggestions to how to address the situation continues to affect us today? >> i will answer that question and say two things. we spend some quality time in michigan. we were amazed by the transformation. there is this institutional as asian story that we hear that around a particular moment in time we let everybody go and they are on the street. that was definitely true. we found compelling evidence in the interviews we did and in the archives. it wasn't the case that everyone was being let go. at the same time the institution was happening. they were being security updated

and everything else. people in a particular category were not being deinstitutionalized. they were being reinstitution elias in different situations. in terms of cultural confidence i would say one final thing. i feel a tremendous amount of responsibility with this project more so than any thing i have ever worked on. part of it is personal given my family history but also to hold these charts in your hand to feel that these are lives that are -- to have a particular momento of your life be this hospital chart is very sad and tragic and gives you a tremendous responsibility and i feel much responsibility as a

psychiatrist because we shouldn't talk about race. we need a better way for talking about race and i feel a clinician's office is a place where engagements about race happen in this country and i think we need better conversations about race. it is not like i am saying -- i try not to be insensitive to that point. the strongest point i try to make is things seemed inevitable in a particular way about this issue, even criminal -- you look at criminals in prison today where we house of them and it seems this system is a particular monoliths for the idea of diagnosis has always been that way. it hasn't always been that way. it is the way we got to this

point. not just attitudes or social construction or noodles floating in the atmosphere or stuff like that but we got to this point because specific decisions were made at a particular moment in time. history teaches us there is not an inevitability the way things seem inevitable and one is this issue of race but also the mistrust and minority communities about cycad tree. it doesn't need to be that way. it is very important that doctors and patients are sensitive. this is -- basically the doctor needs to be more sensitive or

better at expressing their cultural beliefs -- too much pressure. we need to engage structurally at the level of diagnosis. unless we address these bigger issues. something that happens between two people is not effective in my mind. >> jonathan canfield his own questions. over here in women's studies inviting me over and turn it back over to you. >> wait until i have the microphone. >> thank you for your excellent talk. these are questions we should

look into more with respect to this very subject. as someone who consults two members of my family in the field of psychology, including his sister who deals with people who are schizophrenic, there are a couple things i will concede right off the bat such as that james brown position, most of us agreed it is a bit extreme. respectfully, i would have to disagree with you on one point. it is a no-brainer. a black police officer would do the same thing. if you are told that somebody just committed a crime to be crystal if you step backwards and think about it. if they say to you that the person who did it was schizophrenic and you arrive on

the scene, all schizophrenics are violent, under the current definition of psychiatry a person could still be violent and acting out under this type of abuse. you would be careless as a police officer not to be more focused and attentive. i am sure we would disagree with each other on that. a police officer who cares about his own safety who are immediately seen when he or she arrives was also -- put more stock in it. even if you don't consider that most per-capita violent crimes are committed by blacks and don't consider this was taking place in harlem or detroit or downtown south side chicago,

whatever. second, i wonder if more of this study was more due to sexism against males, not black males but the way society views in a sexist way males being more violent than females and you can look at prison populations. what really needs to be uncovered or studied, you mentioned black women were not a big part of the population. i can respect that. that is why is this study needs to be expanded because we might just find out it wasn't really about black men being victims of racism but rather males being victims of racism being seen as more violent than females. that is something that should be looked into. >> this is a question i get from

time to time. in terms of the diagnosis of violence there is literature about violence and schizophrenia. i say you are going to be locked in a closet with someone with mental illness, pick your illness. don't let me in the closet with the person who is on angel dust. there are much stronger correlations -- there are different reasons. there is -- in a particular way that distort reality. i do disagree with you about

that particular point. it is also the question of the black police officer. to divide the two. it held out the advertisement but also what were they thinking? then there is the stuff that is much more structural and invisible and it is structured in not so much personal attitudes. i talked about misdiagnoses, white doctors diagnosing patients of color. studies that have looked at clinicians of colors so they are just as likely to misdiagnose schizophrenia. it is because we focus a lot on the personal attitude. it makes complete sense to me

because i am looking at how the diagnosis became -- second point is about black men. in this archive we have control. there is a strong component, and a different archive -- i am not totally disagreeing. if it happens to these particular men i would like to change that. racial or minority groups -- sickle cell anemia, the

association in this group. it broadens the category of schizophrenia. >> thank you for your talk. i don't want to deflect the analysis, what is currently available seeking the ability to recognize our insight -- the time that institutions are closed. with medications -- i wonder to

what degree the conflict--the first person -- there is a constant conflict around taking your medication, being a compliant patient and following a medical model. we see that in the attempts to get in michigan alternative treatment or civil commitments or even processing through the criminal justice system in order to get people who have mental illness to take medication. my point being some part of your argument is this is a problem which resulted in the development of medication and diagnosis follows the availability of a treatment as much as it does recognition so that the categories about defiance or schizophrenia that occurred -- do you have any notion of them being a

consequence of people being hectored and refusing to accept treatment or refusing to comply with treatment because it is very clear in the notion of an a segovia the personal talking extensively about how to criminalizes mental illness in the pursuit of treatment. >> that is a very well said point which as someone who comes to this the history of pharmaceuticals and medications are a big part of this particular history that are propellant of this particular point leading especially as you say to the institutional as asian but also psychiatry could control aggressive system comes

the d institutional -- like other authors i am very critical of this moment in the book because this was on one hand a moment of progress but also a moment when whatever point we are now, we could justify -- i'm not saying anyone should go back in an asylum or anything but we progressively stopped caring for people or taking care of particular people and these were all happening at this particular moment in the 1960s and medications themselves are a huge, huge part of that. also in very unintended ways. i keep going back to the point where possibly this is a moment where aggression, hostility, progression, now we can trust -- treat those things.

mort severe people will get particular kinds of treatment and at the same time the way this played out in explicit ways and unintended ways, particular consequences. >> i appreciate your talk. on would like to say we haven't quit caring for those people. unrepresented the ywca jal. washington committee health organization. i am the community relations person. one of the projects i have is to work on engaging the community in our services and you just identified a big problem or may be the root cause of why it is

hard to engage especially the african-american community in community health services. there is disparity in their being diagnosed. with schizophrenia more of the time even with these symptoms, there is this whole mistrust because of what you just described. there are those of us trying to serve. now we have the task -- many of them -- >> let me say two things. if you look at the rhetoric

around schizophrenia. there was a stream of mass american culture. this form of mental illness, other kinds of things. it was a problem with us in the mainstream. what happens over the course of this history is among other things services are cut away. it forces people at the front lines like yourself to not just care in the financial and social

support. in terms of one particular case. issues like mistrust might have emerged not because of this case. is happening in more subtle ways. it is a multifaceted issue that is not an linked to the issues we were talking about. this is not just from doctors

into a ski. >> we're looking about ways to address them. not engaging the community, >> hi was wondering if schizophrenia was an illness. >> there are different reasons why that is. having to do with different kinds of angle.

how did schizophrenia occupy a cultural position. i look at it in relation to psychoanalysis and this idea of a split mind being aligned in the 30s and 40s for the unconscious by very being reported by freud. then there is the shift. schizophrenia ties into philosophical traditions related to the admission of double consciousness. that is up play -- in that avenue in part it is because of that.

in american popular culture schizophrenia talked about the idea of what happens when two parts of the mind come together but the black and white parts of society. the history of protest is touted as insane. >> parenthetically unnoticed the analysis as being slightly stigmatized but i don't want to talk about that. different point i want to ask about. if you suddenly see a representation of black males in the schizophrenia diagnosis, how you interpret that depends on how you define schizophrenia.

an entirely biological condition. it was -- an impressive measure on the part of the medical establishment. as we updated the remarks about emotion and development factors entering into a along with, there is a second possibility which is the same thing that drives people to protest not only slavery but discrimination. emphasize the suffering of people who are oppressed. it gives rise to the national political protests but in some

cases -- it can produce symptoms and drive people crazy because it is so obnoxious. that is certainly one way people use to talk about social class. that there were differential incidents of various diagnoses and many other studies that difference psychiatric diagnoses occur with different incidents in various social classes. that was interpreted -- the social and political position of the person in the social order might have the effect of creating certain symptoms. it wasn't interpreted as a over or under diagnosis. if there was more psychosomatic illness symptoms in the working

class or more depression in the upper class. that was not interpreted as overdiagnosis but rather the influence of certain social pressures because that is what i was hoping to get you to comment on. >> i agree with much of that. the relationship between different societal pressures and the exacerbation of mental illness. as you can tell the way i was hedging my bets in that particular answer, it is a delicate issue. schizophrenia and mental illness have gone through different theories over the years, the

downward drift, it causes them to drift down, psychoanalysis -- there was also a term called slumed psychosis. in particular types, obvious associations -- that is a problem. widget is in a particular way. that is not to eliminate in any way social class. the question of overdiagnosis is not the research i am doing. here is this literature that happened and why it happened. in short i would say i love to

talk more about social class because it is a key point in the study and something that is related to this and at the same time you can't totally separate what is happening at the critical level from the classical level and particularly about protests they are not talking about individual protesters. it is a bigger story in which insanity is connected in a particular way. hopefully we can talk more afterwards. >> time for one more? >> a quick question about how long were these men incarcerated? the distinction between those who were participating as opposed to those who were doing

damaging property or violence. how long were they incarcerated during that time? >> the issue my talk about, some of these people were participating in riots. some were guilty by association. there really was a variety of things. what you see over the course of this time period are increasing length of stay. there's a great outcry in newsweek, it exceeded ten years. we will reform people or treat them in a particular way. we see this shift from hospital to a penal model. are we seeing length of stays? we go through this

transformation. some people -- did does very. some come to the psychiatric hospital because of the two year sentence for disturbing the peace or breaking and entering. give and take between the simpsons impacted how long people stayed in. after i talk about the letters of family members trying to get their relatives out and particularly when dealing with psychiatrists, these symptoms -- they kept saying they -- so really, that was the intention in these family letters. >> you brilliantly interweave these narratives. i want to highlight one contract which is striking, which is to

take a black protest movement and placed it against -- violent white protests going on at the same time but the same diagnosis which could have been used for similar special purposes, one of the powers is to -- these people--not a real thing they are doing. i wonder if you thought about why in a similar place where it could have been powerful, white protests -- it wasn't mobilizing in the same way but it becomes a much more racial -- as well as social legitimate process for one group rather than another given that a similar form of violence. >> what i think is happening, we talked about this and i blame capitalism as a short answer to your question which is to say

what you see happening here at this particular moment is for some of the reasons i talked about here and reasons i haven't talked about there is a racial charge discs but this group to be seen because of what is happening internal to other issues and also because in a way one of the arguments is talking about schizophrenia becomes a way of talking about race without talking about race which helps explain a bit of why the quantitative stuff we did, we did literature search in other places and we are talking schizophrenic and negro appeared together rather than by itself and it was overwhelming at that point. in away this became in certain avenues a way of talking about race in a particular way but this was the beginning of what

happened. when some of my students are here, i talk about social protest and there was a crazy guy in the diad who had the symbols and playing the drum and banging his head. it is cool to study the 1916s because across different kinds of divides people felt they were going to change society in a particular way. we are the teachers and the trash men. we are going to change our government at this particular government. one of the larger cultural responsees is the distancing to the point -- across the street. it is different from what people feel they can do. the most recent presidential

election, don't get me started but because of the internet which feels political but actually is disengaging, people feel change in a particular way. there is this moment that -- when we get removed from actual social change. thank you so much. [applause] >> jonathan metzl is a

guggenheim fellowship recipient. he is a professor at the university of michigan. mr. metzl is the author of prozac on the couch and difference in identity medicine. >> carol beck is an administrator with the seed school in maryland. with her four students. tell us why you were at the national press club. >> it is a college public boarding school in baltimore city in maryland. the unique thing is it is not a boarding school. during the week we are in college dormitories and go home on the weekends and the idea is

to have 24 hours and use it as well as we can so our students will be prepared for college. our students are seventh graders and they are already and have been talking about college for over a year since they came to see us as sixth graders last year. >> explain the philosophy behind seed. >> there are students who could really benefit and have life changing experiences is given 24 hours a day to focus on their studies and all kinds of development that will help them be successful not only in college but beyond. our goal is to make sure our students are prepared. >> how are you funded? >> we are largely funded publicly. the state of maryland has made a commitment to the long-term operating of funds for the school. the private sector, individual donors have made it possible for the campus to be built and they

are helping us with startup costs. >> why are you at the national press club? >> we are thrilled to be -- at the invitation of the club which has taken an interest in the school of maryland and our sister school. the idea is our school is a brand-new and we have hardly any books in our library. patrons at the book fair are making their own purchases for themselves and buying dictionaries and novels for our library. students are here to thank them and share with some of the patrons of small books of their own writing. poems and essays they have prepared. >> tell us what your grade is at your favorite subject. >> i am in seventh grade and i don't have a favorite subject because i am good at all but i really like math and i am doing

algebra i. she is a really cool teacher. >> why did you decide to go to the seed school? >> when i got the offer i was away from my parents and i get get my own actions and it is really open. you can be whoever you want to be. the bowl is to go to college. >> what are you reading right now? >> the jreuc reading the diary f anne frank who was segregated and had to go to recreation camps and stuff. we have an opinion about what she is going through. >> we have some more students here.

this looks like devon tingle. i am holding here a book. what is this? >> we have poems written by the students of the school and artwork from our school. >> are you published in here? >> yes. one of my artworks is sufficient that i created. >> show it to us. >> here are some of the art works. and other textures. also these. >> you are a chess player. >> also in the chess club at the school. we have basketball, football and

soccer and other things. >> you are at the press club on author night. what kind of books do you want for your library. >> we have a dictionary that i would like to help us with this school day. also give tips about some of the words used against school. also this is very interesting. this is a dictionary from high-school. i can show you -- >> hold it up so everyone can see it. is this a dictionary you all use? >> this is why people are buying books for our library. we have thing that many people by. >> thank you very much. we have two more students. hi, maia. what are you reading? >> i am reading a book called

the mystery of the ghost. i have been reading that book with various stories in it called chicken soup for the teenage school about how teenagers deal with problems at school and with their lives and how to cope and overcome those problems and it is really nice. we are all in middle school becoming teenagers and stuff. >> what do you enjoy most? >> my friend told me about the seed school. i really wanted to apply because i always wanted to go to a boarding school and i thought it would be a really fun experience. my favorite part is learning on a higher level and learning new things that i didn't know before. i never thought i would learn so

many things. all those things would be so hard. i am already in seventh grade and learning those things and it is very exciting. >> if people are watching this and want to donate something, what would be the best kind of books or resources to donate? >> the best books would be something that would catch our eyes, something very interesting. it doesn't have to be -- it can be real world writing, biographies and dictionaries. you could always learn new words and stuff. it is school to learn new words you never learned before. >> such as this dictionary here. people can buy this dictionary and donated to the school. >> yes. >> one more student we want to talk to and this is madison.

what are you reading right now? >> i am reading the diary of anne frank and i think it is very good and it is how her life was and how difficult it was to be in that situation. >> she was in seventh grade. kind of weird to think about her life and your life. >> yes, it is. >> are you a public? >> i am. at i have a couple poems in this book here. >> what do you like about poetry? >> tell what my life is going through. >> what grade are you in? where are you from? >> baltimore, maryland. >> thank you for spending a few minutes with us.

if people are interested in donating to the seed school, what is the best way to contact you? >> provide our address and phone number. weave a web site. seed schooland indeed.org. >> thank you very much. >> pulitzer prize-winning reporter haynes johnson recalled the life of washington post editorial cartoonist herbert block. the artist's career spanned 70 years and included three pulitzer prizes territorial cartoning and the presidential meda of freedom in 1994. politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. hosted the 40 minute event. >> good event. i am one of the owners of politics and i welcome you this evening.