Documentary explores post-Civil War history of asylum for Black patients

PETERSBURG, Va. — When the American Psychiatric Association celebrated its 175th anniversary three years ago in San Francisco, it featured photographs of two Virginia mental institutions that contributed to its birth — what are now Eastern State and Western State hospitals.

The exhibition also featured two Virginia psychiatrists who led what were then called lunatic asylums — Dr. John Galt at Eastern in Williamsburg and Dr. Francis Stribling at Western in Staunton — and co-founded the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane, the forerunner of the national association.

Former Virginia Mental Health Commissioner King Davis, a featured speaker, was struck by the absence of another state mental institution, now known as Central State Hospital near Petersburg.

The hospital was founded in Richmond in 1870 as the world’s first mental institution for Black people in a state that had also established the first state mental hospital in the nation at Eastern in 1773.

“They had no idea,” said Davis, even though the association awarded him its coveted Benjamin Rush Award for his work to preserve and digitize more than 800,000 records and 36,000 photographs documenting a century of the hospital’s past.

“You have to ask the question, why Virginia?” he said at a recent reception hosted by the American Psychiatric Association Foundation at its headquarters in Washington, D.C.

During the reception, the foundation saluted the archives project by showing a new documentary film, “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane” and giving tours of an exhibition of documents from the archives that has been on display since early February.

The film — written, directed and produced by Virginia Commonwealth University professor Shawn Utsey — was to be featured in the seventh annual Afrikana Film Festival.

Utsey, a professor of counseling psychology and chair of African American studies at VCU, began work on the documentary in 2019 as a study of a hospital founded on racial separation during federal Reconstruction after the Civil War and maintained as a segregated institution for Black people until 1968.

“I ran into King Davis and discovered all the work he had done,” he said. “It made my work a lot easier.”

Davis, now professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin and a resident of Hanover County, makes an emphatic case for the importance of Central State in American history, not just as a psychiatric institution but as a critical condition for Virginia’s readmission to the union in January 1870.

The month before, Maj. Gen. Edward Canby issued an order as military governor of Virginia that required the state to establish a “temporary lunatic asylum” for Black people, both those freed before the war and those emancipated through the Union victory.

Gov. Gilbert Walker, whom Canby had appointed, accepted the requirement and established the Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane at Howard’s Grove, a former Confederate hospital just outside of Richmond in Henrico County that the Freedman’s Bureau had run as a general hospital for Black people after the war.

Central operated at Howard’s Grove as an asylum for mentally ill Black people, including those transferred from Eastern, until the state opened a new hospital in 1885 on the former Mayfield Plantation outside of Petersburg in Dinwiddie County.

The new hospital, renamed Central State in 1894, operated as the only mental institution for Black people in Virginia until the end of racial segregation after passage of the Civil Rights Act 70 years later.