"A Rather Straightforward Problem": Unravelling Networks of Segregation in Alabama’s Psychiatric Hospitals, 1966–1972

Abstract

Racism in American psychiatry can be traced back to the intellectual justifications for slavery, and the early linkage of the black psyche with criminality.1 The idea that the African American was inherently psychologically inferior, less complex, more childlike, or just inherently “bad,” gave rise to centuries of neglect, abuse, and misdiagnosis of black people with mental illness, as well as justifying a system of separate and unequal treatment.2 In Alabama, this system legally ended on February 11, 1969 when the Honorable Judge Frank M. Johnson, Chief Judge of the US District Court in the Middle District of Alabama, handed down his decision in what he called “a rather straightforward problem” in the case of Marable v. Alabama Mental Health Board. In this decision, Johnson laid out in plain detail the many ways in which the State of Alabama and the Alabama Mental Health Board were in breach of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and declared racial segregation in the state’s mental hospitals unconstitutional. Judge Johnson gave the Alabama Mental Health Board 12 months to desegregate its inpatient facilities entirely, or it would continue to have its federal mental health funding withheld and would not be eligible for any further such funds.3 In the context of the powerful Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, mental hospitals became sites of contested ideas about the nature of African American psychology and a challenge to the racist nature of American psychiatry itself. This chapter is part of a much broader project called “Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South,”