"Civil rights-era anxieties about racial protest catalyzed associations between schizophrenia, criminality, and violence."--Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
And prisons emerged where hospitals once stood.
Jonathan M. Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
"'Negroes,'" according to Emil Kraepelin, a German psychiatrist, "'were biologically unfit for freedom.'" Dementia praecox, he called it (The Protest Psychosis, 2009). As Jonathan M. Metzl explains in Psychosis, an American surgeon takes up this claim.
Samuel Cartwright, in 1851, declared in his text that runaway enslaved blacks must have an affliction. A mental affliction! Negroes must have a "medical disorder". Treatable! But a disorder nonetheless, if, for some reason, they pursue freedom. Drapetomania! As a result of Cartwright's report, American psychology altered its assessment of freed blacks and their attraction to freedom by the 20th century. This attraction to freedom baffled the dominant caste. As Metzl writes, "psychiatric author's combined Cartwright's drapetomania with Kraepelin's praecox in order to contend that African Americans were psychologically unfit for freedom".
Black Americans' relationship to freedom continued even after emancipation to be problematic in the US. It's no wonder we black Americans sometimes feel as if we live in an asylum or a prison, even if we never have been in or near either!
**
At Crownsville in Maryland, an asylum reserved for black patients, Elsie, "beautiful", looking "so much like her mom", was "used by science, too", writes Antonia Hylton, author of Madness: Race and Insanity in A Jim Crow Asylum, Elsie's mother died in October 1951. She was 31 years old.
The mother visited her daughter for as long as possible, before cervical cancer shortened her life. Elsie, on the other hand, writes Hylton, had been "diagnosed with cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and 'idiocy'". Elsie, just 10 years old when she enters Crownsville, is 15 years old when she dies, Hylton writes, "alone". Years later, the youngest sister of Elsie decides to investigate what happened to her sister. If their mother had been abused and subjected to racism, what was Elsie's experience?
In the files Deborah obtained from Crownsville was a photograph of her sister. Her "wide chestnut eyes, which once rested beautifully beneath her curls, were nearly swollen shut and bulging from her head". Elsie's hair was "matted and frizzy" and her lips "dry, dark, and twice their former size". In addition, Deborah saw that "two large, white manicured hands gripped Elsie's once beautiful neck, twisting her gaze to the left and holding her in place". To the younger sister, it appeared that the older was "'screaming'".
Deborah, Hylton states, came to recognize in that photo that Elsie, too, had been abused at Crownsville just as her mother Henrietta Lacks had been at Johns Hopkins years before.
"'Sometimes learning can be just as painful as not knowing,'" Deborah told Hylton.
Nonetheless, Elsie, despite her physical ailments and constraints placed on her, became a little "boisterous".
Madness tells another story I hadn't heard either. It involved the Elkton Three, Juanita and Wallace Nelson (life-long partners), and Rose. The three arrived in Elkton, Maryland, off Route 40. This Route 40, Hylton explains was notorious for stopping black drivers. Particularly if the black drivers dared to stop along route! "In 1961, entering Maryland meant no more meals or stops to use the restrooms. Black people were openly and regularly denied service at restaurants, stores, and hotels once over the border."
The friends read a brochure placed by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that read, "'Help Complete the Job. End Racial Discrimination Along US 40.'" So three enter a Bar-H Chuck House and took seats. They only had to sit for 5 minutes. In the meantime, a white friend from Chicago joined them. Kay Fields was ignored but the three black Americans were told that the establishment didn't "serve colored" people.
The State Troopers took the three Philadelphians to jail "for trespassing" while Fields was "allowed to stay". In fact, while the Elkton Three remained in jail, Kay Fields paid a fine and returned to Chicago, writes Hylton. The three blacks went on a hunger strike for 12 days. "They told officials that they would 'rather die' than respond to the court." The magistrate didn't have the power to make the three eat, so they were removed from the jail and driven to Crownsville Hospital.
As Antonia Hylton explains, all three "crossed both physical and invisible color lines, and the punishment for that in the South was not just public shame-- it was a portrait of insanity. Crownsville had become a weapon against those who dared to oppose the existing order."
When black Americans, writes Hylton, "refused to quiet their pain or to live as second-class citizens any longer," they experienced a backlash that reconfigured methods of control and oppression to quell "black protest and criminality." Hence, the preoccupation with crime!
As Hylton continues, "the Civil Rights Movement made criminality a disproportionately prevalent and racialized issue, setting in motion a pattern of events that stretched the definition of criminal behavior strengthened every part of the carceral apparatus. Asylum included." Race presented America with anxieties while resistance on the part of black Americans "crept into psychiatry and reshaped everything about the clinical context for all patients, not just African Americans".
Hylton adds that it was the arrest and treatment, abuse, of the Elkton Three that "white leaders and doctors would unwittingly, misread black anger as mental illness and use tools of psychology to punish, not to heal, the communities they were meant to serve".
For Americans, freedom wasn't for everyone!
In White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Racial Divide, Carol Anderson addresses this issue of white fear, beginning with self-professed Confederates and those claiming to be non-Confederate Southerners who, she writes, "saw black advancement and independents as a threat to their culture... their economy." Many in the "political and economic elite," she adds, "deluded themselves into believing that African Americans were somehow satisfied with the brutal inequality of the status quo."
In other words, blacks were content, Anderson explains, with stolen wages, with black women attempting to live with no rights to their bodies, with their children "illiterate, uneducated, and futureless."
The question posed by Hylton, "What Could Drive a Black Person Mad?," a theme in Madness, echoes an opinion piece written in September 1961, entitled, "Why We Go Crazy". The article is still relevant, unfortunately, since both offer analyses acknowledging the discrediting of black protesters with the label of "insane".
In Joy-Ann Reid's Medgar and Myrlie and the Love Story that Awakened America, Civil Rights activists, including James Meredith, Medgar Evers, with James Baldwin in attendance, held a press conference in response to those opposed to blacks enrolling and attending Ole Miss. They were particularly referencing the "bombastic black interloper", Meredith. The room was filled to the brim with white press anticipating Meredith's resignation and acceptance of his place among the lower caste.
"After listening to the arguments, evaluations, and positions and weighing all this against personal possibilities" I have concluded that 'the Negro ' will not return-- And the white press flew to phones outside the room. Present were only black press and the black activists. Baldwin looks at another "with the innate, mutual knowing that characterizes black existence in America".
Meredith declares that he will return-- to be a free man! As a free man! Because he is a free man! America has a lot to learn.
As Reid writes, in the end, Meredith had "made fools of the racist Mississippi Press" by exposing "the lie of the 'contended Negro'".
From the available documents and the interviews Antonia Hylton conducted, most of Crownsville's history of torture and abuse reads as if the doctors and nurses were members of the Nazi regime. And Crownsville is in the US. Crownsville is part of US history.
I would rather, however, not re-tell the horrors of torture, sadism, practiced at Crownsville on black men, women, and children.
But you, reader, are welcome to read Madness: Race and Insanity in A Jim Crow Asylum. For that matter, White Rage:The Unspoken Truth of Racial Divide, and Medgar and Myrlie and the Love Story that Awakened America, too.
And resist by learning.
