US Racism Waged a Multigenerational Assault on the Mental Well-Being of Black People
I lived in American segregation for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls.
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.
Let me explain.
Life Under Racism
Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.
As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.
I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.
I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.
Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.
The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.
The Psychological Effects of Racism
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)
Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.
In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.
Isolation in the White World
Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.
The Doll Test
Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.
I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).
I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.
But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.
Black Community Support
My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.
But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.
Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.
I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.
There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.
I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.
And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.
The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.
We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”
I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.
After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”
How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.
Interventions
Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.
Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.
Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.
During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.
However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.
For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.
Aftermath
I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.
Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.
