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. 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.

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.

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.

The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate on Crowdcast or via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.

Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby. Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website. 

In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.

We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.

This event will be live-streamed via Crowdcast.

As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.

Please contact us at info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.

By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South-- Kylie Smith in Conversation with Vanessa Jackson & Jennifer Grant