Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South by Kylie Smith

Name: Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South by Kylie Smith
Start: 2026-01-16T19:30:00-05:00
Location: 184 S. Candler St. , Decatur, GA, United States, Georgia 30030

Schedule

Fri, 16 Jan, 2026 at 07:30 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

184 S. Candler St. , Decatur, GA, United States, Georgia 30030 | Decatur, GA

This event takes place in person at Charis and on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Register at the link above to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event.
Charis welcomes Kylie Smith in conversation with Vanessa Jackson & Jennifer Grant for a discussion of Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South, which mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era.
There is a complicated history of racism and psychiatric healthcare in the Deep South states of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. The asylums of the Jim Crow era employed African American men and women; served as places of treatment and care for African Americans with psychiatric illnesses; and, inevitably, were places of social control. Black people who lived and worked in these facilities needed to negotiate complex relationships of racism with their own notions of community, mental health, and healing.
Kylie M. Smith mixes exhaustive archival research, interviews, and policy analysis to offer a comprehensive look at how racism affected Black Southerners with mental illness during the Jim Crow era. Complicated legal, political, and medical changes in the late twentieth century turned mental health services into a battlefield between political ideology and psychiatric treatment approaches, with the fallout having long-term consequences for patient outcomes. Smith argues that patterns of racially motivated abuse and neglect of mentally ill African Americans took shape during this era and continue to the present day. As the mentally ill become increasingly incarcerated, Jim Crow in the Asylum reminds readers that, for many Black Southerners, having a mental illness was--and still is--tantamount to committing a crime.
About the Author
Dr. Kylie Smith is Associate Professor in the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and Associate Faculty in the Emory College Department of History at Emory University in Atlanta. Professor Smith received her PhD from the University of Wollongong, in New South Wales, Australia, and came to Emory in 2015 as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in Nursing and Humanities. Her first book, Talking Therapy: Knowledge and Power in American Psychiatric Nursing, won the Lavinia L. Dock Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing and the American Journal of Nursing’s Book of the Year Award in the area of History and Public Policy.
In 2022, Dr. Smith became the Founding Director of the new Center for Healthcare History and Policy, which supports collaboration, knowledge-sharing and community-building across Emory University and Emory Healthcare. The goal of the Center is to build pathways and opportunities for students and faculty to incorporate historical insights into health care work that advances justice and equity.
Her new book, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South will be published by the University of North Carolina Press this fall.
About the Conversation Partners
Vanessa Jackson is a social worker, Soul Doula and owner of Healing Circles, Inc., a healing practice based in Atlanta, GA. She also creates healing aromatherapy sprays through Dudley’s Apothecary.
Vanessa is the author of In Our Own Voice: African-American Stories of Oppression, Survival and Recovery in Mental Health Systems and Separate and Unequal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Psychiatric Hospitals, monographs on the history of African-American psychiatric experiences and Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Feminist Reflections on Therapy with Low-wage Earning Women in Psychotherapy with Women: Exploring Diverse Contexts and Identities (Marsha P. Mirkin, et al ,Eds.). She is co-editor of Understanding Power: A Human Services Imperative with Elaine Pinderhughes, MSW and Patricia Romney, Ph.D. Vanessa is a nationally recognized speaker on mental health issues, with a focus on culturally conscious therapy and therapy with marginalized populations. She has developed a concept, “fiscal trauma”, which served as the foundation for an economic empowerment recovery program for survivors of domestic violence. Ms. Jackson’s passion is supporting activists in creating healthy and balanced lives. She offers an Activists Assistance Program to provide politically conscious and clinically sound coaching and healing workshops to Atlanta-area feminist non-profit organizations. She serves as a Senior Facilitator for Black Emotional And Mental Health Collective (BEAM). Vanessa is a member of the Radical Optimist Collective which facilitates racial healing conversation
Dr. Jennifer Grant is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at Emory University School of Medicine and Associated Medical Director of Psychiatric Emergency Services at Grady Memorial Hospital. Dr Grant received her MD and PhD from Emory University School of Medicine and remained at the institution for combined postdoctoral training in General Psychiatry and Health Services Research.
Using her expertise in community psychiatry and severe and persistent mental illness, Dr Grant serves as the co-director of the Community, Culture, and Global Curriculum for Psychiatry residents. She is actively involved in pedagogy, educational support, and training related to structural competency in medical education, specifically focusing on how historical systems of inequality and stigma intersect in the lives of marginalized people living with mental illness. She is regularly involved in classroom and clinical teaching, curriculum development and national teaching workshops for psychiatrists. As associate medical director of Grady Psychiatric Emergency Services - the only 24-hour Psychiatric Emergency Service (PES) in the metropolitan region, she actively engages in quality improvement projects and root cause analyses, with a particular focus on process improvement in PES, inpatient psychiatry, and the Emergency Department.
In her free time, she enjoys knitting, reading, and spending time with family.
The Fox Center is Emory University's hub for the humanities. We convene researchers across a wide range of disciplines, methods, and modes of creative practice to advance our understanding of critical topics in culture and society. We are dedicated to rigorous inquiry and an engaged intellectual community which reaches beyond the walls of the Center. Our programs include residential research fellowships, public lectures and seminars, and seed funding for interdisciplinary research collectives. To learn more, visit fchi.emory.edu.
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In-person event guidelines:
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