Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South

Tuesday, November 1, 2022

6-7:15pm Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Click here for the recording

~ Sylvan E. Stool Memorial Lecture ~

Kylie M. Smith, BA, PhD

Associate Professor and Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities

at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

AND Associate Faculty in Department of History, Emory University

Psychiatric hospitals in the United States have always functioned as spaces of both custody and care. In the mid 20th century legislation was passed in an attempt to improve conditions and treatment practices for patients, but these developments were delayed in the South due to an insistence on racial segregation. In this talk, I draw on extensive archival sources from my book in progress to show the ways that Southern psychiatric hospitals in the mid twentieth century had become home to many thousands of Black patients with mental and physical disability, where treatment and care was custodial at best, violent and abusive at worst. Yet these hospitals were also the scene of important Civil Rights activism in the 1960s which revealed the ways that psychiatry functioned as a tool of white supremacy. This activism led to the end of segregation, but could not fix the racism that underpins the provision of mental health and disability care today. 

This project is funded by the G13 Grant from the National Library of Medicine and will be published by UNC Press in 2024.

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its generous support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Image is a colored wood engraving of a large, old-fashioned white building with many windows set behind a grassy lawn with trees. An American flag flies from the roof in a blue sky with white clouds. Two women with hoop skirts and parasols walk in the foreground. It is labeled "Bloomingdale Asylum (Lunatic). / A Department of the New York Hospital." Bloomingdale operated 1821-1899. Image courtesy Wellcome Images.