Antonia Hylton on ‘Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum’

Larry Wilmore: Black on the Air

The Ringer

Society & Culture

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2024

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Larry is joined by Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton to talk about her latest book ‘Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum’. They begin their conversation by talking about what inspired Antonia to write about the Crownsville mental health facility and the tribulations surrounding black mental health in the early part of the 20th century. Next, Antonia details her personal connection to the book's subject via the tragic story of her dad’s cousin Maynard who struggled with schizophrenia and Larry reads a powerful passage from ‘Madness’ that leads to a discussion about residual effects of terror tactics used by racists during the Jim Crow era (22:08). After the break they shine a light on how Crownsville evolved over time to become an integrated and valuable resource for the local black community until it's closure in the early 2000’s (40:52). Antonia ends the pod by offering accessible ways to propagate positive mental health accessibility and acceptability in working class societies going forward (56:57). Host: Larry Wilmore Guest: Antonia Hylton Associate Producer: Chris Sutton Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Brian Curtis from The Ringer, and I want to tell you about the Press Box podcast.
0:06.0	The Press Box is a podcast for anybody who likes news, whether it's about sports or politics or pop culture and wants to understand how that
0:16.0	news really gets made. We have new shows every Monday and Thursday. We have long
0:20.7	interviews with everyone from John Crackower to Joe Buck.
0:24.0	Your social media feeds are bursting with information every day.
0:27.5	Let us help you sort it out.
0:29.5	Join us on the press box. All right, welcome back everybody.
0:47.0	Very, very, very, looking forward to this talk today. It's one of those, it's one of those tough ones. It's like I call it tough medicine talks, but it's really fascinating.
1:03.6	And I heard about this book a while ago,
1:06.3	and then I was reminded recently about it.
1:09.3	And I'm, you know, I love history,
1:12.2	but finding about your own history in surprising ways is also very
1:16.4	important and this book kind of does that in very stark ways to the book is called
1:20.4	madness race and insanity in a Jim Crow asylum.
1:25.0	And I'm very happy to have her Emmy and Peabody Award winning NBC News
1:30.5	reporter, Antonia Hilton, the author of the book welcome to black on the air
1:34.2	Antonio thank you for having me it's such a pleasure have you and this is such a
1:38.6	tough book an important book it feels like you know this is one of those man you know I'm fascinated by how many
1:48.4	Cracks there are out there holes that we just don't know about or that have been forgotten they've just things that have been forgotten.
1:53.0	They've just things that have fallen through the cracks, I should say.
1:56.0	You know, I was looking at a special
1:59.0	and I know B Wells the other day,
	...

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