Ferguson, “white women got one thousand and colored women got a negligible thirty-five.” (The term “colored,” she explains in the opening pages, is a term of art of statisticians of the period, as are such designations as “imbeciles” and “lunatics.”) Valuably, the author also examines psychiatric files to investigate presumed offenses that brought African Americans to Milledgeville in the first place. She notes, for example, that when it came to calico dresses at the time of the supposedly separate-but-equal tenet of Plessy v. Social justice activist Segrest interrogates the records to give specific weight to such charges. Mentally ill (or so declared, at any rate) African Americans were put to work in fields and factories and deprived of books, writing materials, and personal items mentally ill whites were given more leeway and greater privileges. Founded in 1842 and operational until a decade ago, it was part of a system that, as with other institutions in the Deep South, was divided by race. Some 25,000 bodies lie buried behind the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, Georgia, the world’s “largest graveyard of disabled people,” part of the world’s largest mental asylum. A penetrating study of color-line injustices in the realm of psychiatry.
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