Jim Crow and the Asylum:
Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
with Kylie Smith, PhD
Tuesday, February 10, 2026 at 7pm (eastern)
via Zoom
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Jim Crow in the Asylum:
Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South
REGISTER BELOW
There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing.
Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era.
This presentation is based on the recently published book of the same name.
Kylie Smith, PhD
Kylie Smith, PhD
Kylie Smith is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Healthcare History and Policy in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, and Associate Faculty in the History Department, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She earned her PhD in the history of psychiatry in Australia, and is the author of the award winning book “Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing” published by Rutgers University Press in 2020. Her new book entitled “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South” will be published by UNC Press in December 2025 and has been supported by the G13 Grant from the US National Library of Medicine.
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