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James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South

Air date: Thursday, September 15, 2022, 2:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
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Description: In 1969, after a protracted legal battle, Judge Frank M. Johnson of Alabama ordered that segregation of that state’s psychiatric hospitals was illegal and unconstitutional. In his judgement, Johnson drew on government inspections and grass roots legal activism to critique the terrible conditions that prevailed for Black patients. In this lecture Dr. Smith will give a preview of her forthcoming book Jim Crow in the Asylum in which she will demonstrate that racial segregation in psychiatric hospitals in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi was supported by underlying racist ideologies and has had long term consequences for psychiatric care in the South. This research draws on extensive records from the NLM, national and state archives, and the papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and is supported by the G13 Grant from the National Library of Medicine.
Author: Kylie M. Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, 2021-2022 President’s Humanities Fellow, Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow for Nursing & the Humanities, Emory University Atlanta, Georgia, and 2019 NLM G13 recipient
Runtime: 1 hour