I will try to integrate your questions as much as possible. Mab segrest is a professor at Connecticut College and a longterm activist and social justice movements. She is author of memoir of a race traitor. An addition of that book came out in 2019. She is also an author of other books. I am delighted to be here. You spent more than a decade writing this book. What is it that first grabbed you and held so long. Alabama and ind love southern literature growing up in the south in the 1950s and the apartheid culture, a little white girl in a segregated family. Dontalways looking for i understand this and i turned to writers. I didnt know what milledgeville was. I knew that i had been threatened to be dragged off to in the 1950s and 1960s when i was at my most interesting and curious. From my aunt out may, the deep dark secret which was that my greatgrandfather, a confederate veteran, died in a hospital in alabama in 1901. He was committed by a family because he thought he saw people shooting at him from trees and he started shooting back and they felt like it was too dangerous and they sent him off. He died six months later from an infection on his face. Which a lot of people did in these asylums. It is thought that he had ptsd or anothervil war rampant disease in the south. It is very curious and she said that his commitment explained all of the peculiarities. All of those things drew me. I googled the milledgeville asylum and found this amazing article from the atlanta constitution in 1998 where the had come backil to visit, gone to the train station and seen the lobotomy tools, straitjackets, and shock boxes. Then they went to the cemetery. There were 25 bodies 25,000 bodies out there. They went out to see them. Was one quotation that it was the most gruesome sight in georgia. It wasd have been us devastating. The voice just grabbed me. Two weeks later, i was at a train station in the cemetery. I thought this was a hell of a story. You have the scene, the drama, the conflict, and deeply engaged voices and people. It drew me. I thought about carson and the more i studied it, the more i it is notat histories of southern asylums. 16 years later, you go deep into the history. Theriginally opened as Georgia State lunatic, idiot, epileptic asylum founded in 1842. You go back even further to the muskogee and cherokee indians who were later forced off the land. What bearing did they have, that history on the georgia asylum built in 1842 . Those questions i was asking myself as a white girl in apartheid alabama, studying history has given me the answers to those. The question of the intimate and historic and how things happen and why, it was always a recourse of history for me. I was first interested in the georgia asylum from the 1940s. I kept getting drawn back. I wanted to see what does it mean to have an asylum founded in 1842 and a slave culture. By the time i got back, it was like five years ago, it was the trail of tears where the cherokees were forced out. How do i explain that when its not in any of the records . What about slavery . History ofd in the the institutions and also u. S. Asylums has really been scrubbed of the most painful fascinating tumultuous real aspect of u. S. History. I wanted to write asylum history that put the asylum act into the history and but the people who were drawn to the asylum were committed to the asylum back into that history to understand how the manifestations that got them there, how they were interpreted grew out of this culture, this culture of conquest and moving out Indigenous People and bringing in african people. That became the whole project. They did change how communities cared for people considered lunatics or idiots or imbeciles and you uncovered a number of the stories that had been scrubbed over from a number of patients like Francis Edwards. She was admitted 1856. What was her story and how does that illustrate the familial dynamics of the time . To tell theermined story of the asylum from the perspective of its patients. There is so little patient stories and patient narratives in psychiatry. Waysnd from all different the way to get the stories. Ledgers ofas in the the georgia asylum which i spent my first semester in georgia going through the microfiche of the georgia archives. Suddenly someone drops out of you jumps out at you and the person who wrote it realized it was a good story. Francis was like that. Tolday that the story was was perplexing. Its like her has been to put her in there, she had turned against him for some reason. Being weirdly maybe she was a witch. She had this theology that people didnt like. People started looking at her weird and encouraged her husband to do that. At a certain point, she got she hadat him and then a baby and she came to the asylum. I said where does he beat her with a wagon with . Or does that go into the story . Suddenly she was alienated and her affections for him so what happened to white women in these families in the south where the slave culture was permeating them with whether or not they owned slaves or on a plantation or were in town, there was a lot of wit flying in georgia. I read a book on divorces and there were lots of, the main reason for divorces of white women in antebellum georgia in the south was brutality by the husband. There were other women who were beaten with wagon whips. Became a wake up on what Domestic Violence was in white families and how it showed up in asylums and help the patriarchy, the balance of white and other culture had impacted the psyche and behaviors that got people sent there. But of the other things i had found in that first year of the microfiche which can put your sudden, was all of a new people were coming. There were homicides, suicides, he attacked his father and tried to jump down the well or she tried to kill herself. It was all showing up in the records. It had been there all along, but the person writing it down started to be more interested in it. People were interested in sending people off to the asylum. Francis was one of those illustrations of the level of violence embedded. From the illegal violence, cultural violence embedded in the slave culture. She illustrated what happened to these women. Many women went to the asylum because they were being abused by their husbands in all different ways. The husband never went. But the women went. Francis let me get into all of those gender dynamics. We have a question from the audience that speaks to that. What was the makeup of patients by gender. The question is any top reasons you discovered why they were there . If you want to clarify and ask the question. I didnt track gender all the way through specifically. There were more men than women there. The preconceptions is that all the women got thrown in because they had radical ideas and so forth. Its a whole range of things. , i got the there sense that there was a tripwire back in the community at home. This something will happen, you will hit that wire and the people who used to tolerate you or take care of you, they wont do it anymore or they cant do it anymore. Now they have a place to send you, they can send you to milledgeville. If your husband dies or if you are in menopause or youre stressed about that or you had a or you might have had a baby and you were depressed, whatever. Families and communities had to take care folks. Then all of a sudden the sudden in 1842, he didnt have to do it. Its a variety of things. What constituted insanity was a compendium of all of those things. The people who landed there because they are getting committed from the county. This is a story of all of the counties and families in georgia and what happened. Homes determined by back and what event is the pertaining this this changed tremendously after the civil war when in 1867, basically the georgia military forced by the that is occupying or the Union Soldiers that are now occupying georgia to admit patients of color. I want to get to your subtitle racism and the haunting of american psychiatry at the asylum. How is racism connected to this foundation of american psychiatry outside of milledgeville and the south especially at that time . The more i study it, the more i came to see that the state is am is where there mediation between the psyche of the individual, the culture, and the needs of the state. , a settlerers colonial state is where europeans come and settle and stay. They dont just rule from afar and send the goods back home to the mother country like france or england or spain or whatever. Over so they got the goods. What does the state need in this process. The asylum was, in addition to consolidating the state like a used to be, you sent everybody to the capital of georgia which was milledgeville from 18041867. What they were doing across the board in these asylums which were the first places where there was psychiatry, the asylum doctors were the first psychiatrist. What i saw that they were doing is like stripping the history from the symptoms of the people. You would have this description of like Francis Edwards maybe she was smoking and shes mad at her husband and who knows where that came from and she has a religion but it doesnt say theres Something Else going on like he beat her. The history was stripped. You had to go back and rearrange the narrative to know that her husband had frequently beat her and he had the power to send her off. The stories about power and control and history, they are not in the mix. Once you have taken the history out from people, you can call them anything. You also dont have to be accountable for the amount of pain there is in the culture of conquest and slavery. Have these asylums that dont deal with that, then you can rewrite the history and the people who are being most victimized, they really started to see how psychiatry in these asylums it was both place of practice of teaching people to stay in line, be careful or we will send you to milledgeville or wherever. Production ofcal where people were and who deserved sanity or equality. Asylums delivered that all across the country. Before 1900, 90 of africanamericans lived in the south. The southern asylums played a particular role in formulating antiblack racism preand post reconstruction basically after emancipation. N, the northern asylums had moved the native people out in light of southern superintendents they saw as the experts on the need grow. Need grow. Those practices against people and of ideologies of race and racism. What became codified at that time was the idea that because after the war as expected by the surgeon general, there were floods of people going to the asylum in georgia and other places. The trauma of war is one of those things you point out. Also, the trauma of reconstruction and slavery and torture and lynching and the white superintendent at milledgeville and other places believed that it was emancipation itself that had actually made black people crazy for lack of a better word. They were from the safety of the plantation. How did this actually support the lost cause narrative and the repression of black people during reconstruction . I want to go back to the civil war briefly. Its a pivot point in the narrative that i am telling. The war is brutal. Hereditary. Even if you broke down in a war like the civil war which had the justst level of violence, rule wars. Brutal wars. Soldiers fought, collapsed, they had to get up and bury their buddies and fight again. You broke down the body and the mind. There was a huge amount of psychic rate there. Ofre was no real explanation ptsd or shellshocked. There, they were blamed. ,hite people who were soldiers their trauma was not understood either and was not understood after the war. Particularly white people, that whole narrative about slavery is hygienic and its good for you and people are taking care of you. You better take care of yourself or you dont know what will happen. Black people come into the asylum and it is right when all of this other stuff is starting to happen. They come in with no history provided. Louis soandso no history provided. I really want to show in the book what that history is. This is an example of asylum psychiatry scrubbing patients of history. If there is any limit text to this, it is having africanamericans come in in 1867 after slavery, after the war, emancipation, land violence is starting all across the counties and they have no history. Im not cursing but what in the world does that mean . Not to have history. List from the ledgers of all of the black people who came in the first 10teen years. 1015 years. I wanted to match up these black people with the lynchings. I didnt have the list of 18671880. Rom a wonderful colleague at georgia havege just happened to that list of lynchings from georgia by county and chronology. I got to match up the black people who came in as patients and the lynchings and it turned out that sally came in with no history furnished was from a whoty Columbia County had the most lynchings in this time. I just go down, all of those lynchings and what does that mean . Through that town. Its a little bitty place in the road and people had to know each other. Theres a jail and a courthouse. She comes in with a shoot amount of trauma is any black person and no history furnished. This is where i get the most mad. I let myself step out from behind to say just a minute now. If psychiatry cannot register inching, and what can it register . What is going on when lynching, which is brutal, people were ,ismembered, they were burned terrible combinations of sadistic. Neither county level is pathology or a crime. This brutality is not a crime. The sheriff doesnt arrest you. Neither pathology nor a crime, then there is a big gap. One theorist talked about these things just fall into it. Then once all of this violence is fallen into the crypt and you have no history, then you can get blamed for everything because you should have stayed slave. We told you you should have stayed a slave. You can see inset of some of the Police Videos what that looks like. You kill a man by keeping your knee on his neck for eight minutes when people around you are begging you not to. Ofeally think that kind continuing brutal antiblack racism is in there also. Point, i had my finger in the archives on this process of denuding people from history. By the turnofthecentury, we had the problem negro because anything that happened from sharecropping to poverty to repression of the vote was heartbreaking after freedom like oh my god jubilee and freedom and this beautiful passage from the boys that i quote free at last, yet they were. Because the self really lost the war in one piece. In 1976. White supremacy was restored then, you had to eliminate the black vote which happened with violence and you had to theinate black equality and idea that they should have stayed slaves. Its all blamed on their nature with being propagated and developed within culture. There was a lost college , it was that was 1867 the postconfederate playbook. It is playing today. This carried over into the 20th century. Of course, others have pointed out what that rachel racial terror did not just to black communities suspending them in fear but the brutality and how that affected white people as well. We can tie these questions into each other. One, for those who were committed by others or who have felt where they released and what constituted grounds for the release . To who, this may lead actually gets swept up because during the u. S. Reconstruction, there were loitering laws against africanamericans. [indiscernible] i think i get the gist of your question. Its a little frozen here, but i concert to answer it maybe. Im sorry, i lost you for a half second. The loitering laws and what happened to black people and do they get swept up into there. I was expecting that. Actually, that was not true. Spot 50 asylum because of overcrowding were really for the counties. There were a lot of white people they wanted to send off. They didnt want too many black people taking that up. Most georgia politicians wound up until about 1888, black people counted for 13 . When they hit 38 , you had black men and black women being rounded up into the prison system. They came in immediately leased out to major corporations to build the south. People in thelack penitentiary which was burned down. Its going to be the labor system. 190 of black people went into the police and the other percent when it to the asylum. The police were sweeping people up, they changed misdemeanors to felonies so they could get people and send them off and they made a huge amount of money off of that. That is one of the things that you point out as the georgia asylum and georgia sanatorium. Theres also evolution of treatment. Heroic therapy initially. Ery aggressive purging diarrhea defecation defecation moving people through bleeding people. Then Occupational Therapy putting people to work in profusion of produce, meat, milk, tremendous amounts and production to defray the cost of care. Tell us a little bit about how these treatment worked. Anyes a question here evidence of experimentation on patients and what were the treatment practices back in the 1800s and what was documented as effective . It wasnt scientific enough to be experimentation because the heroic medicine which was bodily humors and you had to balance the ball out like the hydraulic system of the fluids of the body so you could bleed people and purge them. If you are throwing up or if you have been bled, your Energy Levels are going to drop. Was the idea of the enlightenment that you could transform the environments where the mad lunatic had been brought to confine them. Shift the environment which is basically sociology. People can behave better. So they built these asylums that were on the outskirts of town. Hospital is two miles from the center near the capital. They were supposed to be beautiful. You had gardens that you can walk around. You were getting away from your family which was supposed to be a structured environment and they didnt let people read the bible. That was upsetting. You could go to church sometimes. Then the doctor could Pay Attention to you. Were 300 or 400 patients. You were treated kindly and you got food and you got to walk and you got some work. Whole thing was supposed to be curative. Mall therapy was gone. All of those other things really fell away. What came to the fore was Occupational Therapy. It was more occupation than therapy. By 1888 when theres 30 black people all of a sudden, there are certain markers of Industrial Production and i tracked it through because in 1874, there were 200 hogs that were slaughtered. Over79, they listed it as 7000 pounds of pork. And you go from pig to pork, you are talking about pounds as an industrial measure. By 1886, there were over 10,000 pounds of pork. By 1893, there were 29,000 pounds of pork. Theres a lot of pork being killed there and being produced there. I jumped forward at a certain point to the 1950s. There was a slaughterhouse on the asylum grounds which is the only one in georgia. 649,000 pounds of pork. Bragged that the patients did two thirds of the labor. Its not so clear that the patients are working there, but they arent saying that anyone else is. Its the most hellish kind of imagination what you do to psychiatric patients is put them in a slaughterhouse. I did a little bit of reading on it and they are terrible places he had they starve the animals off the top then they kill them and they go down a chute. Theres blood and sharp knives and theres pandemonium of the animals who are terrified. This is Psychiatric Care . This is Occupational Therapy . No, its like work and its essential labor. Know today, has protection. I cant say 100 the patients were doing it, but show me who else was doing it. This is the kind of mechanism that shifts this jiujitsu that is easy to happen in the south from the mall therapy to the plantation to work. It is very gendered. The white women who sewing. The black women to gardening. A colony form which includes cotton. This all starts to sound very it isand it becomes a loose and carson will system. Its not as bad as the state. Rison farm that is really brutal. A very whole thing is stupid. One of the most poignant indicators of it was one of the things i saw when i went to a hospital here in north carolina. Im going to finish this soon, because we have some more questions, but there was a cage. , this is thehow black institution in north carolina, how prisoners were put into this then put out in the augustaugust or july or to calm them down like a straitjacket. But it was very much like a portable car that they were using to carry these black people around. There was a bleed over mechanisms. Its easy to have all that stuff happen there. Prison has on the asylum ground. That is one of the through lines that you point out in the now, the asylum system into 90 is estimated of the people who were imprisoned, nine out of 10 beds statistic is 90 of state psychiatric beds are in jails and prisons. Did families of these patients pay for part or all of their stay or was it paid through taxes in the state of georgia . There were paid patients who could pay some if they could, but mostly it was through the state of georgia. In the early days, they made so much money off of selling native land that was stolen, they did have to pay taxes. But then, it was tax money. Was there a criminal unit at milledgeville . There were forensic units. Decade one on what building is where if you had for for an insanity plea. You murder somebody or you killed them but if you were insane, you would get sent to the asylum and if you are not insane then you get sent to the electric chair. A lot of people provided the electric chair. One building that was built most recently and it was one of the most functional forensic hospitals. People who have mental breaks in prison and get sent there or whatever. Know howterested to the traditional system in the legislative played a role in putting people into asylums. Committing them. By the county in the earliest days, you had Something Like a grand jury so that the family or the sheriffs or somebody could bring a person before that. They had to have families permission and people had to hear the evidence. You would get a judge that, you would go from the jail to the asylum. It changed in 1918 where it took three white men, either a doctor and a judge or to doctors and a judge or Something Like that. I imagine them playing golf together. You right in the book that the sanitarium [indiscernible] the 20th century. White milledgeville and what role did that play in the movement . I missed the first part of the question. Did you write in the book that the georgia sanitarium was a prime target for eugenics. For the movement that was gaining ground in the early 20th century. Can you tell us what role it played in that movement and white milledgeville in particular . One says that georgette was the largest asylum in the united states. They would naturally gravitate toward there. In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation launched the second eugenics office and they start making these lists. They want to get separate institutions and they figure once there are separate tuitions, they can do sterilization. Georgia is rife to a for that. All of these institutions are. They have Stanford University and other major universities behind this who has lots of steam behind it and it has some of the richest people in the country trying to sterilize people. Try to get the legal peace through versus the Supreme Court case which is and West Virginia whose mother was institutionalized and sterilized then she has a daughter and the and this really makes me mad, its hard to talk about it. They set these women up. They even give the eightmonthold and iq test to determine that she is an emphasis and her mother is an imbecile. Write the decision and the last line is three gendered three generations of imbeciles are enough so he legitimizes sterilization in the light of the 14th amendment which says due process equal protection its one of those amendments after the civil war that is supposed to give you some rights and it is completely gutted that way. At that point then, the door to sterilization is open and the very poignant history of the case that i really go into a lot because it was just terrible what happened to them. Then you deny a family their reproductive history, you impoverish them because theres no children to take care of them. Books, theye three were intelligent. They did well in school. They wrote letters. They were just set up. That was the sweep of eugenics which gets to georgia at the andnics commission in 1937 your jewel was slow to eugenics on that end because it was seen as progressive and george it was hardly progressive. Also, talmage realized a lot of intoonstituency might fall but in 1937, they had a Eugenics Commission and surreal as this is, the head of the asylum was a superintendent peacock in the 40s. He was also the head of the Eugenics Commission. He would write letters back and forth to himself on different stationary asking for permission to sterilize a patient and giving it than those people were sterilized. 30005000 women were sterilized in georgia during that time in all parts of the country. Huge amounts of sterilization. 1939, the nazi program was their first extermination program aimed at disabled people because they had been making the lists of all these people in hospitals and they took them into the gas chambers. It began, would this not be a form of true benevolence to take corrective measures against people regarded as degenerates . He wasnt the only people saying that but he was one of the main ones. The georgia asylum was not the only place doing this. Its just we can see it when you look out from there because things are written very large there because so many people were there. Powell was not the only one, but he was very early and you can trace him. The voices of those women and men who were sterilized, those that you found in the georgia archives, their stories written on ledgers and patient intake forms or whatever the equivalent was at the time, they are part of what haunts this book and the hunting that you write about. Theres also the physical form. S is 2000 acres, close asylum officially closed in 2010. There are still some buildings operating. Some of the buildings were turned into prison. There has been much debate about what to do with the mostly vacated 1750 acre milledgeville campus. Any idea on repurchasing or tributes to these patients when repurchasing the campus happens . Yes. The state of georgia has served Baldwin County poorly. Left the psychiatric ruling, many of those buildings have asbestos so they were just boarded up. They have all of this terrible barbed wire all around the. Kudzu. Vered over by its a horror show out there. Its gothic. Unlessrd to repurpose you really claim to history. There should never be a prison type operation on that campus. One of the Nursing Homes now is taking prisoners who are too old and expensive for the prison system and putting them into a nursing home which is cheaper for the state and now its one of the hotspots are covid. Its a gruesome, brutal history. You need to take all that barbed wire down. If youre going to do anything there, you cant just leave this running space for what is happening to these people and say it is a renaissance. The state of georgia needs to do that, because it was their responsibility. When i was there for a semester, i was urging to use one of the buildings Foreign Institute on psychiatry and cumin right. There was good stuff that happened in milledgeville. Its a place to study. Its a place to use these transcripts. Unfortunately, the museum that i was attracted to is now being , using thefor more asylum history and all of those manuscripts and cereals have been boxed up for the last 56 years. There is no indication that its going to come out. At atate of georgia, certain point when i was doing Archival Research out of the rgia archives, secondary secretary of state wanted to close the whole thing down and there was a whole campaign. Georgia needs its archives. It got put into the education system. History is very dangerous to power. Especially to certain kinds of abuse of power. There is a strain of that in georgia. Its still there. Folks in georgia probably nowhere. You can name names. All of that has to be taken into account. And studied. I have done my best to lay out some of it, but there is so much more to go and theres tragedies and comedies, such rich material and georgia has a rich strain of writers. Unless that is taken into account, this ground will always have the spiritual and the , earlymental deficits report of the Hospital Authority listed. I do not think there is a spiritual deficit there. All of the people who lived there and bought there and try to do better there, and for the terrible things that have happened there. There is so much to learn. Theres a huge amount material more and am hoping the book will kick off more conversations and i am willing to have more conversations with the people in georgia. Over, but iinutes would love to talk with you and answer your questions. I am very sorry that i cant either because of covid. I will get there as soon as i can. I appreciate the chance. Inc. You for sharing this conversation with us today. Mab segrest thank you so much for your time. We encourage you to purchase the book. You can do it directly from the chat link or at the link provided at the Atlanta History Center website. Tomorrow, we will talk to another author and it should be a fantastic conversation. Of talks arer scheduled for september. For now, thank you so much for joining us for the Atlanta History Centers virtual author talks. Good night. Youre watching American History tv covering history cspan style with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures and college classrooms. And visits to museums and historic places. All weekend every weekend on cspan3. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] you are watching American History tv on cspan3. To join us in the conversation, like us on facebook. Every 10 years since 1790, the u. S. Government has set out to record data about the population. The count is mandated by the u. S. Constitution and the 24th census is currently underway. Tonight on our series real america, a series of films on the u. S. Census 19401990. Heres a preview. You can count on me. Can we count on you . You can count on me. Help your government get equal representation. Get money its needed for jobs, schools, health care and more. Answer the census. Your answers are kept confidential by law. Can count on me. Can we count on you . You can count on me. Census were counting on you. Answer the census were counting on you. 2,000,004, 2,000,005. The u. S. Census isnt just a population count. It helps allocate federal, state, and local funds to your community for things like schools, and daycare centers. Take a few minutes and answer the census. It counts for more than you think. Headquarters of the bureau of census just outside washington, d. C. A film optical sensing device or an input to a computer. The microfilm is fed into this device. Each frame which is a single census report sheet stops for a fraction of a second while the machine scans it. The census is the first to use these and it does the job that used to require over 2000 operators. Into theare fed computer along with others which tell us what to do with the information. This april 1, we will take the National Pulse for the 19th time in our history. Reaching out to every American Home for the separate statistics that will add up to a fulllength profile of the nation. The census has been handed down to us are the Founding Fathers as part of the constitution. We have reserved it over the years as one of our most useful legacies. Areing check of where we and where we are going is still our common purpose in the census. We helped mommy a lot the census form and we mailed back. Why . Because everybody counts on the census form especially little kids. It helps us get important things in our town like daycare centers, schools and more. The census, kids count to. Learn more about the census tonight at 10 00 p. M. Eastern, 7 p. M. Pacific here on American History tv. American history tv is on cspan3 every weekend and all of our programs are archived on our website at cspan. Org history. You can watch lectures and college classrooms, tours of historic sites, archival films, and see our schedule of upcoming programs. Thats cspan. Org history. In october 1862, confederate cavalry pressed into maryland and pennsylvania including the town of chambersburg to raid for horses and other supplies. Editor talksg about this first major Confederate Movement north of the masondixon line and the union response. This talk was part of a symposium on the war in the east hosted the emerging civil war blog. And 45 minutes, a sculptor discusses the process behind creating a soldiers journey, the sculptural component of the new National World war i memorial which is being constructed in downtown washington, d. C. At 8 p. M. Eastern, 5 p. M. Pacific on lectures in history, professor garcia talks welcome to the emerging civil war symposium. Thank you for joining us in person and online. Before i introduce our next speaker, i want to make a shout today those taking possible including our technical director. Thank you for your work behind the camera. And also, a thank you to our symposium coordinators. The cousin of the pandemic, we had to postpone this years in person symposium and all of the work that kevin and dan did to get ready for that we postponed until next year so