What Happened Inside The Mississippi Asylum Where Black Patients Slept on the Floor

In 1935, Mississippi bought twelve hundred new beds for its brand new state hospital at Whitfield, and the hospital's own report says every one of them went to the white service. The old beds and cots from the colored service were too broken to use. Fourteen years later, a Memphis newspaper reported patients there being forced to sleep on the floor, and it never said which patients. 🎵 Now on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0341T3p... 🔔 Subscribe For more interesting deep dives in these wicked Asylums.    / @quiet-wards   This is the continuation of our episode on the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in Jackson:    • The Entire Story of Mississippi's State Lu...   Whitfield was built on a former state penal colony in Rankin County, where carpenters jacked up the floors of the old convict cages before a single patient arrived. We follow the hospital's own biennial reports from 1931 to 1967: the four segregated services, the commission that built for white patients first, and the 1955 report admitting there had been no new construction for Negro patients since the day the hospital opened. We cover the malaria fever therapy, the hydrotherapy rooms, the 1928 sterilization law, the rubber hose, and the 1949 floor. We follow Arrington W. High, the Jackson newspaper editor who escaped Whitfield inside a casket in 1958, and Clennon King, committed within a day of trying to enroll at Ole Miss. Then the nine-hundred-bed Negro annex, a hospital report still naming a "negro service" three years after the Civil Rights Act, the 1975 PEER evaluation, the Justice Department lawsuit, and the Mississippi jails that hold people waiting for psychiatric beds today. Articles and sources used for research: https://www.msh.ms.gov/node/42 https://ms.gov/Agencies/mississippi-s... https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/e... https://egrove.olemiss.edu/ms_state_h...