Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum

Mab Segrest's Memoir of a Race Traitor changed the way we think about struggles against white supremacy. Now, after more than a decade of research, Segrest turns her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology, one whose influences extend into our troubled present.

In December 1841, the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum was founded on land taken from the Cherokee nation in the then-Georgia state capitol of Milledgeville. In April 1949, Ebony magazine reported that for black patients, "the situation approaches Nazi concentration camp standards . . . unbelievable this side of Dante's Inferno." Georgia's state hospital was at the center of psychiatric practice and the forefront of psychiatry thought throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America--centuries during which the South invented, fought to defend, and then worked to replace slavery in America.

Administrations of Lunacy reveals how modern-day American psychiatry was forged in the traumas of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. This history set the stage for the eugenics and degeneracy theories of the twentieth century, which in turn became the basis for much of Nazi thinking in Europe.

A landmark history of a single insane asylum, Administrations of Lunacy will forever change the way we think about race in America.