Madness

On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. 'Madness' transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum as author 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 Maryland.