Madness With Antonia Hylton

Meet the Author

Award-winning NBC correspondent Antonia Hylton joins us to talk about her Maryland-based book Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum.

Conversation facilitated by Leslie Gray Streeter, columnist at The Baltimore Banner. Book sales and signings follow the discussion. This program is held at Randallstown Community Center. 

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 to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Hylton blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents while chronicling the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. She also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations.