- This event has passed.
Madness with Best-Selling Author Antonia Hylton at New Canaan Library
February 27 @ 7:00 pm
Widely listed as one of the best books of 2024, Madness tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people’s bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable. Hylton will be in conversation with former ABC News Correspondent and Anchor Heather Cabot.
On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. They became the first twelve patients of the state’s Hospital for the Negro Insane, later called Crownsville Hospital. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America’s evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. This program is co-sponsored by LiveGirl and New Canaan Library.
Antonia Hylton is a Peabody and Emmy-award winning journalist at NBC News reporting on politics and civil rights, and the co-host of the hit podcasts Southlake and Grapevine. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she received prizes for her investigative research on race, mass incarceration and the history of psychiatry. She lives in Brooklyn.
Photo credit: Mark Clennon
Elm Street Books will be onsite to sell books.
