A journalist’s impassioned and rigorous study of a 20th-century psychiatric hospital uncovers how Black Americans were institutionalised by a country still in thrall to the logic of slavery
t the beginning of this heartfelt, deeply researched inquiry into the history of mental illness in America’s Black population, journalist Antonia Hylton describes a regular meeting with a close relative in a park in Massachusetts. The relative – who does not want to be identified in the book – is suffering from a very specific paranoia: they believe that white supremacists are hunting them down.
The terror of lynching has been replaced by a fear of police killings and by the mass imprisonment of young Black men Over the course of 10 years of research into Crownsville, Hylton tracked down and interviewed dozens of former patients and employees, and brought a forensic eye to the hospital records that had not been destroyed to conceal decades of evidence of abuse.
As the population of Crownsville grew, so the abuses multiplied. In 1943, an employee at the hospital revealed to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People how patients were forced to eat rotten food and sleep on bare wooden floors.
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