Finding Asylum is an institutional and social history that describes how the state of Virginia managed mentally ill African Americans at Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane between 1885 and 1935. As the nation's first asylum dedicated exclusively to the care of African Americans, Central was established in Virginia as the model southern, black asylum, an archetype that was replicated across the southern United States in the decades following the end of the Civil War. It reveals how race and gender bias bled into psychiatric theory and practice at Central. It also provides a window into the lives of black Virginians who were committed and eventually confined to the institution. Finally, it tracks how raced and gendered understandings guided state imperatives to confine, treat and sterilize African American patients at Central.
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