but this was a special morning in a special part of america, a place where negro children had never gone to school with whites before. ♪ hatred is easier to organize than understanding, and there was a minority in our state who found it to their advantage to bring hate in little rock media for more clips and talks. founded in 1841, the georgia state lunatic, idiot, and epileptic asylum became the largest mental institution in the world with more than 10,000 patients. up next, mag sigrid talks about its history in her book "racism and the hunting of american psychiatry."

the atlanta history center hosted the discussion and provided the video. ms. prescott: hello, and welcome to the first virtual author talk series. i am virginia prescott host for , these talks. tonight i am talking with mab rest about her new book. you can purchase the book directly from a couple of books at the link provided at the atlanta history center's website. there is also a link to the right of your screen on the chat and there is desk that is also where you can ask westerns. please submit your questions that i will try to integrate them as quickly as possible. mab segrest is a professor emeritus of gender and women's studies at connecticut college, and a long-term activist and social justice moment -- activist in social justice movements.

she is author of "memoir of a race traitor." she is also the author of my mom scleral." uar she is also an author of other books. welcome. mab: i am delighted to be here. ms. prescott: so, you spent more than a decade writing this book. what is it that first grabbed you and helps along? mab: i grew up and alabama and i love southern literature growing up in the south in the 1950's and the kind of apartheid culture, a little white girl in a segregated family. a pretty segregated family. i was always looking for her, how do i understand this, and i turned to writers. franky adams. he was threatened. he was told, they are going to drag you there.

she didn't know where it was, but she knew she would be dragged there. i knew that i had been threatened to be dragged off to milledgeville in the 1950's and 1960's when i was at my most interesting and curious. [laughs] you got to be careful. then i found out from my at may, the deep dark secret in my family, which is that my great-grandfather confederate , a veteran, died in a hospital in alabama in 1901. he was committed by a family because he thought he saw people shooting at him from trees and then he started shooting back and they felt like that was too dangerous and he sent him off.

he died six months later from an infection on his face. which a lot of people did in these asylums. it is thought that he had ptsd from the civil war or another rampant disease in the south, allegra. she said his commitment explained all of the peculiarities. all of those things drew me. but mainly, i wanted to write on carson. i googled milledgeville asylum and found this amazing article from the "atlanta constitution" in 1998, where the consumer council had come back to visit, gone to the train station and seen the lobotomy tools, seen the straitjackets, seeing the shock boxes. they were weeping, and then they went to the cemetery, one of seven. there was 25,000 bodies out there. they went out to see them.

they were just sobbing. there is one quotation that, "it was the most gruesome sight in georgia." they could have been us. it was devastating. the voice just grabbed me. two weeks later, i was at a train station and i went to the cemetery. i was drawn. i thought, this is a hell of a story. you have the scene, the drama, the conflict, and deeply engaged voices and people. i just felt like a just drew me. i thought about carson and the more i studied it, the more i it really wasn't of a history and thought it would be. and there aren't histories of southern asylums. so i thought, let me see if i can do that. in 16 years later, finally. ms. prescott: you go deep into the history. it was originally opened as the georgia state lunatic, idiot, &

epileptic asylum founded in , 1842. you go back to the founding of the georgia colonies in the 1730's and even further to the muskogee and cherokee indians who were later forced off the land. what bearing did they have, that history on the georgia asylum built in 1842? >> i have always been a history -- those questions i was asking myself as a white girl in apartheid alabama, studying history has given me the answers to them. the question of the intimate and the historic and how things happen and why, it was always a recourse of history for me. i was first interested in the georgia asylum from the 1940's. i kept getting drawn back, i wanted to see what does it mean to have an asylum founded in 1842 in the slave culture. agohe time -- five years was the last trail of tears,

when the cherokees were forced out. so i thought, how can i explain that? it is not in any of the records. what about slavery? what i found in the history of the particular institutions and also the history of u.s. asylums has really been scrubbed of the most painful fascinating , tumultuous real aspect of u.s. history. so i really wanted to write an asylum history that put the asylum back into that history and put the people who were drawn to the asylum or commit to the asylum, sometimes for 40 years, back into that history, to understand how the manifestations that got them there, how they were interpreted and grew out of this colonial culture of conquest and moving out indigenous people and bringing in african people. growing cotton and everything. that became the whole project. ms. prescott: did it change how communities cared for people considered quote unquote

lunatics or idiots or imbeciles ,, and you uncovered a number of the stories that had been scrubbed over from a number of patients like francis edwards. she was admitted 1856. so, what was her story, and how does that illustrate some of those familial and communal dynamics of the time? determined towas tell the story of the asylum from the perspective of its patients. because there is so little actual patient stories and patient narratives in psychiatry. from alland i found different ways, the way to get these stories. 's story was in the ledgers of the georgia asylum which i spent my first semester in georgia going through the microfiche of the georgia archives. you just go and you go, and it is so, ugh, and then all of a sudden, it jumps out at you. it,person who wrote

realized it was a good story. frances was like that. the way that the story was told was perplexing. her husband had put her in there . she had turned against him for some peculiar reason. she started being weirdly -- like maybe she was a witch. she had all of this theology that people didn't like. people started looking at her weird and encouraged her husband to do that. then at a certain point, she got furious with him and at some point he beat her with a wagon hip, then she had a baby and then she came to the asylum. i thought, where does he determine a wagon whip? or does that go into the story? suddenly she was alienated and in her affections for him. i thought, what happened to these white women in these families in the south where the slave culture was permeating them with whether or not they owned slaves or on a plantation or were in town, there was a lot

of whips flying around in georgia. i read a book on divorces, and there were lots of dust the main reason for divorces of white women in antebellum georgia in and in the south was brutality by the husband. there were other women who were beat with the wagon whips. so frances became kind of like a way to unpack what that domestic violence was in white families and how it was showing up in the asylum, the values of patriarchy, the violence of supremacy, the violence of the southern culture had affected the psyches and behaviors that got people there were sent there. one of the other things i found in the microfiche, which can put your eyes out, it really can, after 1842, in the

1850's, we knew why people are coming. there were homicides, suicides, mother, heked his attacked his father, he tried to jump down the well or she tried to kill herself. it was all showing up in the records. it had been there all along, but the person writing it down i think started to be more interested in that. people were interested in sending people off to the asylum. thosences was one of illustrations of the level of violence embedded, familial violence,cultural embedded in the slave culture. she illustrated what happened to these women. many women went to the asylum because they were being abused by their husbands in all different ways. the husband never went. but the women went. so frances let me get into all the gendered and nymex. ms. prescott: there is a question from the audience that speaks to that, it is, what was

the makeup of the patients by gender? the question is any top reasons you discovered why they were there? if you want to clarify and ask the question. mab: i didn't track gender all the way through statistically, but there were more men than women there. one of the myths or preconceptions is that all the women got thrown in because they had radical ideas and so forth. but it's a whole range of things. because -- ihere got the sense of there was a tripwire back in the community at home, and something will happen, you will hit that wire and the people who used to tolerate you or take care of you, they won't do it anymore or they can't do it anymore. now they have a place to send you, they can send you to milledgeville. so, if you husband died, for instance, or if you were in menopause and you husband was kind of stressed about that, or you might have,

had a baby and you were depressed, whatever, families and communities had to take care of folks. then all of a sudden in 1842, wow, you didn't necessarily have to do it. so it was a variety of things. really what constituted insanity was a kind of compendium of all of those things. the people who landed there because they are getting committed from the county. this is really a story of all the counties in georgia and all the families in georgia, and what happened in these asylums is determined by back home and what event is precipitating this to get you sent away. ms. prescott: and this dynamic changes tremendously after the war, in 1867, basically the georgia asylum is forced, basically by the military that is occupying, or the union soldiers that are now occupying georgia, to admit patients of color. i want to get to your subtitle

-- racism and the haunting of american society at the asylum.ville how is racism connected to this foundation of american psychiatry outside of e and the south especially at that time? mab: the more i study, the more i came to see that the state as lm is where there is a mediation between the psyche and the individual, the culture, and the needs of the state. states,lers of colonial a settler colonial state is where europeans come and settle and stay. they don't just rule from afar and send the goods back home to the mother country like france or england or spain or whatever. you know, so we were a settler colonial culture. 1776ettlers took over in so they got the goods of the continent. need indoes the state this process?

what the function of the asylum was, in addition to consolidating the state collected it used to be everybody was in the county, and now you sent people to the capital of georgia, which was from 1804-1866, 1867, what psychiatry was doing across the board in the asylums which were the first places where there was psychiatric, asylum doctors were the first s what i,atrist thought they were doing was stripping the history from the symptoms of the people that came in there. you would have a prescription of frances edwards, maybe she is smoking and she doesn't like her husband, and she has a weird religion. but it doesn't say, just a minute now, there is something going on, he beats her best the history was stripped. you had to go back and rearrange

the narrative to know that her husband had frequently beat her , and then he had the power to send her off. so the stories about power and control in history, they are not in the mix. so once you have taken the history out from people, you can call them anything. you also don't have to be accountable for the amount of pain there is in the culture of conquest and slavery. a culture of indian removal. just huge amounts of all of that. but if you had the asylums and don't deal with that, you can rewrite history, and the people ,ho are being most victimized -- i really started to see how psychiatry in these asylums it ofs both a place practice for teaching people to stay in line -- be careful or we will send you to milledgeville or wherever -- but it was also

an ideological production of where people were and who deserved sanity or equality. asylums really delivered that. they did it across the country. before 1900, 90% of african-americans lived in the south. so the southern asylums played a particular role in fo fomenting anti-black races in pre-and post reconstruction basically after emancipation. then the northern asylums, who didn't have experiences with black people and had moved all the native people out then relied on southern superintendents home they saw as experts on the negro. cauldron of calle practices against people and of ideologies of race and racism. ms. prescott: and what became codified at that time was the idea that because after the war as expected by the surgeon , general, there were floods of people going to the asylum in other places.

the trauma of war is one of those things you point out, obviously, but also the trauma of reconstruction and slavery, and torture and lynching. at the light superintendent best the white superintendent at milledgeville and other places -- and the white superintendents at milledgeville and other places believed that it was emancipation itself that had actually made black people crazy for lack of a better word. unmoorede o on from the safety of the plantation. how did this actually support the lost cause narrative and the repression of black people during reconstruction? mab: i want to go to the civil war just recently and then go back to the reconstruction piece, because it is a pivot in point the narrative that i am telling. the war is brutal. prevailing explanation for incident he was that it was he ready terry. even if you broke down in a war

the civil war, which had the highest level of violence, just brutal wars, soldiers marched, they fought, they collapsed, they got up and had to bury uddies around them -- you broke down the body and you broke down the mind, there was just a huge amount of psychiatric -- here. there was no real explanation of ptsd or shellshocked. those veterans there, they were blamed. enough.n't manly so why people who were soldiers were not getting very good -- they are trauma was not understood after the war. but particularly for black people, that whole narrative about slavery is hygienic and it is good for you and white people are taking care of you so those yankees better not free you and you better not for yourself

because you don't know what will happen. i really traced this in a lot of the data. also, not people come into the asylum in 1867, all of this other stuff is starting to happen. they come in very often with no history provided. lewis so-and-so, no history provided. so i really wanted to show in the book what that history is, you know, this is an example of a set of psychiatry scrapping patients of history -- example scrubbingpsychiatry patients of history. if there is any limit text to this, it is having african-americans come in in 1867 after slavery, after the war, emancipation,klan violence is starting all across the country and they have no history.

i'm not cursing but what in the world does that mean? not to have history. i made a list from the ledgers of all of the black people who came in the first 10-15 years. first from the freedmen's bureau, and then from the county. than i had a very smart assistance when i was out the college, and i wanted to match up these black people with the lynchings. i didn't have the list of 1880.ngs from 8067 to so one of the scholars just happen to have a list of lynchings from georgia by county and chronology. i got ashley to match up the black people who became patients, and the lynchings. it turns out that sally, who came in with no history, was

from the county, columbia county, near augusta, that the most lynchings in this period, eight or nine. so i just go down. what does this mean for sonic and in -- for sally? i drove through that town. it's a little bitty place in the road and people had to know each other. there is a jail there, the courthouse was there. a people, nine people, all the different ways that people had been lynched. in.comes a high amount of trauma as any black people in that history furnished. this is where i get the most mad. i let myself step out from behind to say, just a minute now. if psychiatry cannot register lynching, and what can i

register? which is what was going on. lynching, which is brutal, people were dismembered, they were burned, terrible combinations of -- sadistic. like the most combinations of sadism. iss at the county level neither pathology. none of these people were sent for being ventures. and it is not a crime. the pathology is not a crime. the sheriff doesn't arrest you. it is neither a pathology or a crime. and it is this big gap. quipped, these things just fall into it. then once all of this violence is fallen into the crypt and you have no history, then you can get blamed for everything -- you should have stayed a slave. we told you. you see. and you can see it in some of these police videos lately what that looks like. when you kill a man by keeping

your knee on his neck for eight minutes when people around you are begging you not to. this called brutality, -- that is why you should have stayed a slave. i really think that kind of continuing brutal anti-black racism is in there too. so i thought at that point, i kind of had my finger in the archives on this process of denuding people from history. --.then you start to so by the turn-of-the-century, you had the problem negro, because anything that happens, from sharecropping to poverty to repression of the vote, must've been heartbreaking after freedom, like, oh my god, jubilee and freedom. this beautiful passage bois that i quote, it was like, free at last, but they weren't. the south really lost the war in one piece. white supremacy was restored

then, you had to eliminate the black vote, which happened with violence. and you had to eliminate black equality and the idea that they should have stayed slaves. it's all blamed on their nature with being propagated and developed within psychiatry. so it was very much part of this --t cause ideology, 1867 someone wrote the book, it is really the post-confederate playbook. end it is playing today. so this carried over into the 20th century. ms. prescott: and of course, others have pointed out what that racial terror did not just to a communities by suspending them in fear, but they brutality and how that affected white people as well. the couple of questions here, i wonder if i can tie them into each other. for those who were committed by have -- were they

released and what constituted grounds for the release? then another, this may lead to who actually gets swept up, because during the u.s. reconstruction, there were loitering laws against african-americans. did your research show former slaves sent to -- [inaudible] mab: i think i get the gist of your question. a little frozen here, but i can start to answer it, maybe. ms. prescott: i am sorry, i lost you for a half second. mab: the loitering laws and what happened to black people and do they get swept up into there. i was expecting that. any space you could put a black person in they would put them in there. but actually, that wasn't true. the spots in the asylum, because of overcrowding were really primed for white people. they didn't one too many black people taking that up.

the space was more dust extending the space was more expensive. and most georgian politicians were not going to spend on human needs. so up until about 1888, black people were capped at 13%. then it hit 38% in when they hit 1888. 38%, you had black men and black women being rounded up into the prison system. when they came in, they were immediately leased out to major corporations to build the south. so you had from kind of black zero people in the penitentiary , which was burned down, and that built up again. it is going to be the labor system. than those people. , --run the corporations there were 2400 black man by the end of the century. black -- 90% of black

police and into the the other went to the asylum. the police were sweeping people up, they changed misdemeanors to felonies so they could get people and send them off and they made a huge amount of money off of that. ms. prescott: that is one of the things you point out as the georgia asylum turned into the georgia sanatorium. then when it was closed, later a hospital. it is also the evolution of treatment. heroic therapy initially. very aggressive purging. involving a lot of say, diarrhea, defecation, moving stuff -- bleeding people, moral therapy, and then occupational therapy. putting people to work in profusion of produce, meat, milk, tremendous amounts and of output to defray the cost of care. tell us a little bit about how

these treatments worked. there is a question here -- any evidence of experimentation on patients, and what were the treatment practices back in the 1800s, and what was documented as effective? mab: right. it was incentive enough to be experimentation, because this heroic medicine which was bodily four different humors, and you had to balance them all out, kind of like the hydraulic system of the fluids of the body so you could bleed people and purge them in all of different ways. if you are throwing up or if you have been bled, your energy levels are going to drop. so the moral therapy was the idea of the enlightenment, that you could transform the environment where the mad lunatic had been brought just to

you can shift the environment, which is the kind of , restructure something and people can behave better. so they built these asylums that were on the outskirts of town. the hospital was two miles from the center near the capital. they were supposed to be beautiful. you had gardens that you can walk around. you were getting away from your family which was supposed to be a structured environment and -- they didn't let people read the bible. that was upsetting. you could go to church sometimes. and then the doctor could pay attention to you. cappeds supposed to be at 300 or 400 patients. you were treated well. you were treated kindly. you got food and you got to walk and you got some work. but it wasn't supposed to be the

whole thing. by the time you hit 1000 patients or 1300, all therapy was gone, even though all the superintendents in the 19th century gestured to it, as all the good they were doing. but all those things fell away. oret really came to the f was occupational therapy. by 1888 when there's 30% black people all of a sudden, there are certain markers of industrial production. 1874, there were 200 hogs that were slaughtered. by 1879, they listed it as over pork.ounds of so when you go from a pig to pork, and you are talking about pounds, it is more kind of an industrial measure. by 1886, there were 10,400 something pounds of pork.

by 1893, there were 29,000 something pounds of pork. there's a lot of pork being killed there and being produced there. i jumped forward at a certain point to the 1950's, and there battoir or slaughterhouse on the asylum grounds which is the only one in georgia. 649,610 pounds of pork. they bragged that the patients did two-thirds of the labor. it's not so clear that the patients are working there, but they aren't saying that anyone else is. it's the most hellish kind of imagination of what you would do to a psychiatric patient is put them in one of these slaughterhouses. i was doing a little bit of reading on it and they are terrible places. they start the animals off the top and kill them, then they go down a chute, there is blood and sharp knives, there is on the

pandemonium of these animals who are terrified, and this is psychiatric care? this is occupational therapy? no, it is work and it is essential labor, and as we know today, it has all these protections. so i can't say 100% all the patients were doing it, but show me who else was doing it. so this is the kind of mechanism that shifts, this kind of jiu-jitsu that is easy to happen in the south from the mall moral therapy to the plantation, to work. it is very gendered. the white women do sewing, the black women do gardening. black men do the agricultural production out on the farms, which includes growing cotton. all of this trust the sound very familiar. prisons too. it is a very consula car several system.

carceral a very car system. it's not as bad as the state prison farm. that is really brutal. fixedole thing is a very stew. one of the most poignant indicators of it was one of the things i saw when i went to cherry hospital here in north cage in, there was this a museum, the only thing left after the hurricane came through and destroyed everything, but it explained how -- this was a black institution in north carolina, how prisoners were put in this and then put out in the sun in august or july or august, to calm them down like a straitjacket. but it was very much like a portable car that they were using to carry these black people around. so there was this really a bleed

over of mechanisms. it's easy to have all that stuff happen there. today, today, geo prison has -- a little installation on what was asylum ground. ms. prescott: that is one of the three lines in the book, the asylum system into now, 90%, it is estimated, of the people who are imprisoned, nine out of 10 beds -- is 90% oftatistic state psychiatric beds are in jail. ms. prescott: that's right. we are going to out of time, so i will ask you this, did families of these patients pay for part or all of their stay or was it paid through taxes in the state of georgia? mab: there were paid patients who could pay some if they could, but mostly it was through the state of georgia. in the early days, they made so

much money off of selling native land that was stolen, they did not hardly ever have to pay taxes. but after the mexican war, it was tax money. ms. prescott: was there a criminal unit at milledgeville? who were the patients? mab: there were forensic units. a dependent in some ways on what decade. you could have somebody sent for -- for an insanity plea. you murdered somebody or you killed them but if you were insane, you would get sent to the asylum and if you are not insane then you get sent to the electric chair. so a lot of people preferred the asylum to the electric chair. so they would have separate units. back in the 19th century they just threw everybody in together and you wouldn't know who was what. but there were definitely separate institutions there. the cook building was built most

recently, and is the most functional forensic hospital which had a combination of those folks, either people who had mental breaks, in prison and then get sent there. ms. prescott: interested to know how the judicial system and a legislative buddy played a role -- and the legislative body played a role in putting people to be asylums. committing them. mab: by the county in the earliest days, you had something like a grand jury so that the family or the sheriffs or somebody could bring a person before that. they had to have the family's permission and people had to hear the evidence. then he would go from the jail to the asylum. although if you came in with corpus --ry, habeas it changed in 1918, where it took three white men, either a doctor and a judge or to doctors -- two doctors and a judge, all these men from the county. i can just imagine them playing

golf together. today it is a different kind of --. in thescott: you write book that the sanitarium was a -- [inaudible] the 20th century. why milledgeville and what role did that play in the movement? which was consequential? mab: i kind of missed the first part of the question. ms. prescott: you write in the book that the georgia sanitarium was a prime target for eugenics. for this movement of those gaining ground in the early 20th century. can you tell us what role it played in that movement, and why milledgeville in particular? larson, who writes of the eugenic history in georgia says that georgia was the largest asylum in the united states. so they would naturally gravitate toward there. in 1910, the carnegie foundation

establishes its second eugenics office in cold spring harbor and he started making on these lists and go out to legislatures and basically get feebleminded people institutionalized. and it have to do a bunch of things for that. want toeally they institutions, and they figured, once they get separate institutions, they can do sterilization. so georgia is rife territory for that. the stanford binet intelligence test is very much schemed up by the eugenics folks. they had columbia university another major universities behind this. some of the richest people trying to sterilize some of the poorest people in the country. and they are able to finally get the legal piece through in a supreme court case, which is a

woman in west virginia whose mother was institutionalized and sterilized, then she had a folkser and the eugenics -- it really makes me mad, almost hard to talk about it -- they set these women up, they set these females up. they even gave the eighth month old an iq test to determine if she wasn't in the cell. was an imbecile, her mother was an imbecile. so they write the decision and the last line is three generations of imbeciles are enough, so he legitimizes sterilization in the light of the 14th amendment which says due process equal protection , it is one of those amendments after the civil war that is supposed to give you equal rights and it is completely gutted that way. at that point then, the door to sterilization is open. this very poignant history of the case that i really go into a

a lot because i just thought, it was just terrible what happened to them. when you deny a family their reproductive history, you impoverish them because there's no children to take care of them. and it turned out that none of those girls, they were intelligent. they did well in school. they wrote letters. they were just set up. so that was kind of the sweep of eugenics, which gets to georgia through the eugenics commission in 1937, and georgia was slow to eugenics on that end because it was seen as progressive and georgia was hardly progressive. [laughs] so talmage realized a lot of his constituency might fall into the surgery. but in 1937, they had a eugenics commission. urreally as this is, in

the asylum was a superintendent in the 40's. he was also the head of the eugenics commission. he would write letters back and forth to himself on different stationary asking for permission to sterilize a patient and then doing it, then those people were sterilized. so 3000-5000 women were ,, mostly women, were sterilized in georgia during that time in and in all parts of the country. huge amounts of sterilization. 1939, the nazi program was their first extermination program aimed at disabled people because they had been making all those lists of these people in hospitals and they took them into the gas chambers. ms. prescott: do you think it began as the superintendent said, would this not be a form of true benevolence to take corrective measures against people regarded as degenerates? powell wasn't the only person saying that, but he was

one of the main people. the georgia asylum was not the only place doing this. it's just we can see it when you look out for wet roads asylum, because things are written very large there because so many people were there. powell was not the only one, but he was very early and you can trace him. you can see how he evolved. ms. prescott: those other kind of voices -- the voices of those women and men who were sterilized, those that you found in the georgia archives, their stories written on ledgers and patient intake forms or whatever the equivalent was at the time, they are part of what haunts this book, and the haunting that you write about. but there is also this physical form. this is 2000 acres. the asylum officially closed in 2010. there are still some buildings operating. some of the buildings were turned into prisons. denise asked, there has been much debate about what to do with the mostly vacated 1750

-acre milledgeville campus. any idea on repurchasing or tributes to these patients when campusse thing of the est repurpos -- when repurposing of the campus happens? mab: yes. the state of georgia has served baldwin county poorly. after the psychiatric ruling, many of those buildings have asbestos so they were just boarded up. they have all of this terrible barbed wire all around the. then they boarded up, so it is discovered by kudzu. it is gothic area really a horror show out there. it is hard to repurpose unless you really claim the history there, and there should never be a prison-like operation on that campus. one of the nursing homes now is taking prisoners who are tooled

and expensive for the prison -- and expensived for the prison system and putting them into a nursing home which is cheaper for the state and now it's one of the hotspots are covid. so there is just this gruesome and brutal history that i enumerated, and you need to take on of that barb wire down. you can't leave this rotting space for what happened to all these people and then say that it is a renaissance. the state of georgia needs to do that, because it was their responsibility. when i was there for a semester, i was really urging to use one of the functional buildings for a kind of institute on psychiatry and human rights. because there was good stuff that happened in milledgeville. one of them we didn't get a chance to talk about. so it is a place to study. it's a place to use these transcripts. unfortunately, the museum that i was attracted to is now being repurposed for more, using the -- for a larger kind of museum

that really truncates the fnm history -- the asylum history, and all those many scripts and archival material have been boxed up for the last 5-6 years. there is no indication that it's they are going to come out. , at a state of georgia certain point when i was doing archival research out of the georgia archives, the secretary mp wanted to close the whole thing down. and there was this campaign, no georgia needs its archives. , it got put into the education system. history is very dangerous to power. especially to certain kinds of abuse of power. there is a strain of that in georgia. and it is still there. and folks in georgia probably know where. you can name names. all of that has to be taken into account. and studied. and i have done my best to lay out some of it, that there is so much more to go. there is tragedies and comedies,

there is so much rich material and georgia has a rich strain of writers too. so unless that is taken into account, this ground will always have the spiritual and the environmental deficits, early report of the central state hospital authority was -- i do not think there is a spiritual deficit there. all the people who have lived there and fought their and tried to do better there, and for the terrible things that have happened there, there is so much to learn. i have done a little bit of it. there is a huge amount more material and i am hoping the book will kick off more conversations and i hope to have more conversations with the people in georgia. we are two minutes over, but i just talk with you all and answer your questions. [laughs] and i am very sorry that i can't be there because of covid. i will get there as soon as i can. i would love to have more of

these conversations, so i appreciate the chance. ms. prescott: thank you for sharing this conversation with segrest, thank you so much for your time. mab: thank you. ms. prescott: we do encourage you to purchase the book. you can do it directly from the chat link on the right of your screen or also at the link provided at the atlanta history center website. tomorrow night, isabel wilkerson will be talking about her new book with john meacham. it should be a fantastic conversation. a number of talks are scheduled for september. it is evolving all the time. you can go to atlantahistory center.com. again, thank you so much for joining us for the atlanta history center's virtual author talks. good night. >> this is american history tv, featuring events, interviews, archival films and visits to college classrooms, museums and historic