Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
Kylie Smith is an associate professor, director of the Center for Healthcare History and Policy in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and associate faculty in the history department at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her Ph.D. in the history of psychiatry in Australia and is the author of the award-winning book Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing published by Rutgers University Press in 2020. Her new book entitled Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South will be published by UNC Press early in 2025 and is supported by the G13 Grant from the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
In 1967 a government inspector reported that conditions for Black patients in psychiatric hospitals in Alabama were the worst she’d ever seen, not just in terms of the physical conditions but in the relationships between staff and patients. Her report and a subsequent court case revealed the many ways that even psychiatric practices in the American South could not escape the long shadow of the plantation as patients were put to work, shot, beaten, and left to die.
This government inspection was the starting point for Smith’s new book Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South. The project draws on original records, court cases, and personal testimony from Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, which demonstrate the racist ideas that underpinned the treatment of African Americans with mental illness and saw psychiatric hospitals used as dumping grounds for some of the South's most vulnerable people.
At the same time, Black families, communities, and activists sought to end Jim Crow in the Asylum and to fight back against practices of dehumanization and social death. In this fight, the internal racism of psychiatry itself was exposed, as diagnostic classifications and treatment modalities reinforced stereotypes about the Black mind and body. Smith will talk about some of the ethical and archival issues associated with undertaking this kind of research and analyze the significance of this long historical context for disparities in mental health today.
