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Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum
March 17 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EDT
The Baton Foundation will host a conversation with journalist and author Antonia Hylton about her new book that centers mental illness, slavery, and racial segregation in the United States. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Book
In Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum (Hachette Book Group, 2024), Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family’s experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.
In her book, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable. Please use this link to purchase the book.
About the Speakers
Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcast Southlake and Grapevine. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.
Kiplyn Primus is a journalist, strategic marketing professional, and host of WCLK’s (91.9) The Local Take with Kiplyn Primus—a public affairs show that features discussions about critical issues facing Atlanta and profiles organizations engaged in important work in the station’s constituent communities.
Ms. Primus has had a long career in public and commercial media, including stints with The Atlanta Tribune, Global Atlanta, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her work in strategic marketing focuses on health, finance and the tech industry, including Goldman Sachs and the DeKalb Hospital Authority. In addition, she has written extensively on global and local initiatives for several publications and media outlets. Kiplyn is also a veteran facilitator with the Atlanta-based StoryCorps studio—the largest oral history project in the United States.
Ms. Primus received a BA degree in journalism and English from Howard University (Washington, D.C.) and an MBA in marketing from Clark Atlanta University (Atlanta, GA).