NBC journalist Antonia Hylton spent more than a decade piecing together the history of Maryland's first segregated asylum, where Black patients were forced into manual labor. Her new book is Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Also, Ken Tucker reviews the new album The Interrogator from The Paranoid Style. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
On the Ted radio hour, linguist Ann Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people where they will say to me, but.
It can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is.
The history behind words causing a lot of debate.
That's on the Ted radio hour from NPR.
This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is journalist and author Antonia Hilton.
She's written a new book called Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum, and in it, Hilton traces one of the last segregated asylums in the nation, Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, built in 1911 from the ground up by twelve black men who would later become patients there, some spending their entire lives in the hospital.
As Hilton writes in her book, by the end of the 20th century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus to house the mentally ill.
Hilton, who is a journalist with NBC, spent more than a decade of investigative reporting and archive retrieval to piece together the 93 year history of Crownsville.
She explores what that history tells us about the state of mental health services and public perception today.
And Hilton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental health and the shame it has reproduced for generations.
Antonia Hilton is a Peabody and Emmy award winning journalist for NBC News, reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co host of the award winning podcast South Lake and Grapevine.
Antonia, welcome to Fresh Air.
Tonya, thank you for having me.
Well, this story of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, it gripped you right from the start.
How did you first learn about it?
I first learned about Crownsville when I was just 19 years old.
I was in college.