Professor Kylie Smith’s long-awaited new book, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South, is set to be published by UNC Press January 13th, in both print and open access digital editions. The enhanced digital edition, which was supported by ECDS, showcases the innovative techniques of digital publishing through Manifold, including GIS storymapping and data presentation via Tableau.
The work details the complicated history of mental health care in the U.S. South in the twentieth century, examining how segregation produced deeply unequal disparities in the provision of care. The book also questions how the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 impacted the quality of care and documents the way grassroots activists, families, and patients themselves advocated for change. Professor Smith’s work demonstrates that long after the passage of the act, racial inequities and forms of abuse prevailed within the mental health care system. The book focuses on three Southern states as case studies – Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. In the course of her research, Professor Smith used sources from court cases, policy documents, government investigations, newspapers, personal correspondence, and oral histories.
Originating out of a conference presentation in 2018, Smith’s book has considerably evolved since its initial inception, benefitting from extensive collaboration with Emory’s Fox Center, as well as Emory Center for Digital Scholarship. The book project has also been supported by the Grant for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health from the National Library of Medicine, a highly competitive award that is only given to one scholar annually. Professor Smith has been at the forefront of pioneering open acess scholarship at Emory, deciding early on in the project that the book would be published on an open access basis. Driving this decision was a desire for the book to be accessible to the surviving descendants of the individuals who form the heart of the narrative, and to make archival sources that have been previously difficult to find for the public more readily available.
This commitment to open access and engagement with digital technologies has been supported by several Emory programs. Smith was part of the inaugural cohort of the Mellon-supported Digital Monograph Writers’ Workshop, which was hosted in the Fox Center from 2021-2023, and her book received a subvention from the Digital Publishing in the Humanities program, which offers humanities faculty funding to publish their books open access. Consequently, the vision for Smith’s book project has grown alongside her extensive research and writing process. Reflecting on these valuable partnerships, Professor Smith said:
I was so grateful to have the support of the Fox Center for this project, as both the President’s Humanities Fellow and as part of the Digital Monograph Writers Workshop. I learnt a lot about when, and when not, to use digital technologies, but most important was the support for Open Access publishing which is so necessary for public and reparatory history, especially at the moment.
ECDS staff members have cooperated with Professor Smith in creating the different digital modalities available in the open access version of the book. Megan Slemons, GIS Librarian, worked with Professor Smith to create detailed GIS storymaps that illustrate how the provision of care diverged depending on the kind of institution that patients were being treated at. Yang Li, Senior Software Engineer at ECDS, created dynamic visualizations of historical diagnostic data using Tableau.
A hybrid book launch is being held at Charis Books in Decatur (next to Agnes Scott) on Friday January 16th. The event is co-sponsored by the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Attendance is free but virtual attendance requires pre-registration. More information about the event is available at this link: https://charisbooksandmore.com/event/2026-01-16/jim-crow-asylum-psychiatry-and-civil-rights-american-south-kylie-smith