Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South Kylie M. Smith

This year I have been teaching a class on the history of the asylum to my students at the University of Strathclyde. It begins by exploring how asylums have been depicted in popular media, often as the setting for horror films or a setting where horrible things take place. We spend some time undermining this perception, exploring why asylums emerged, investigating the lives of patients, and assessing whether these controversial institutions were forces for good or ill. We often try to determine the intentions behind the creation of asylums: were they there to control society’s undesirables? Or were they genuinely intended to help the less fortunate? Usually, the students come to a fairly nuanced conclusion: asylums were generally founded on laudable principles, but often came unstuck due to wavering support. Kylie M. Smith’s new book, however, demonstrates that there was at least another, much darker, purpose to at least some asylums in the American South, namely to replicate the system of plantation slavery. In other words, psychiatry in the American South was very much a tool of white supremacy employed within the Jim Crow system to keep Black people in what many White people believed was their place, sometimes literally, as well as figuratively.