A Fresh Start for ‘Maryland’s Shame’

Some of her descendants say she fell and hit her head stepping off a streetcar in the 1930s. Others speculate she might have suffered from untreated postpartum depression or perhaps early menopause, which caused her to act erratically. Still others were told she obsessively played piano—the instrument she had taught and performed to acclaim in community concerts, at church and even for silent movies—to the detriment of her family and young kids.

Whatever the reason, her family made the desperate decision in 1939 to commit Dawson, then 46, to Crownsville State Hospital, a place initially called the Hospital for the Negro Insane of Maryland.

Her second-oldest son, 23-year-old Robert Dawson Jr., drove her there. “He regretted that for the rest of his life,” says his daughter-in-law, Mary Ellen Dawson.

Rosalia’s two youngest, 6 and 11 at the time, bounced between family members as they grew up, lacking the stability of a mother to hold the family together. She never reunited with her children or husband, and died five years later of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Dawson was just one of thousands of patients who suffered at Crownsville Hospital during its nearly century-long existence. Patients in need of psychiatric care were instead crammed into damp, crowded cells, where children slept two per bed, head to feet; forced to work the property as unpaid laborers; fed rotten food and experimented on without their consent.

This dark history is what inspires one of Rosalia’s descendants, Joi Howard ’03, to pursue a different future for the long-abandoned hospital property. She has worked for years to reclaim portions of the land, now owned by Anne Arundel County, for community agriculture and a wellness center, focused on the needs of its Black residents, to build something positive from a past defined by harrowing abuse and neglect.

“We want to make good on the promise of Crownsville,” says Howard, who created the nonprofit enBloom Collective to bring together Black farmers and health and wellness practitioners to help transform the site. “How can we turn this into a hub of healing, led by the Black community?”

What should have been a sanctuary and a place for healing was twisted from the very beginning, when the hospital for Black psychiatric patients was constructed in 1911.

“It would be the first and only asylum in the state, and likely the nation, to force its patients to build their own hospital from the ground up,” writes journalist Antonia Hylton in her 2024 book, “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum,” which delves into the hospital’s complicated history.

Overseen by white doctors and staffers in scenes eerily reminiscent of the antebellum South, Black patients laid bricks, wove baskets, cleared fields and planted corn, cabbage and watermelon on the 1,500-acre property—and were even sent to neighboring farms as free labor to harvest crops.

And after the hospital was up and running, smallpox, scarlet fever and tuberculosis tore through the overcrowded population in the 1920s and ’30s, since Crownsville lacked isolation spaces to stop the spread.

In the 1940s, a series of newspaper exposés, including one called “Maryland’s Shame: The Worst Story Ever Told in the Sun-papers,” laid bare the dire conditions. White attendants drank on the job and beat patients brutally, even fatally. Women were placed in “the cage” for punishment—80 crowded into a space meant for 35, sleeping in their own filth, perpetually dirty because of the facility’s water shortages. Children sat idly in bare rooms all day, receiving no schooling or job training. And just eight doctors were employed to care for more than 1,800 patients.

The recruitment of a new superintendent, Jacob Morgenstern, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, and the hiring of the first Black psychologist licensed in the state, Vernon Sparks, helped usher in a new era for the hospital as it was desegregated in the 1950s. Newly hired Black staffers introduced recreational activities, taking patients camping and to the beach, while Sparks created a clinical internship program that lasted for a quarter century.

For a few decades, the hospital became one of the area’s top employers, especially for Black workers propelled into the middle class by the steady income. And during that time, some patients were able to get the treatment they needed and returned to society to continue with their lives.

But the disability rights movement, the advent of new antipsychotic drugs and a national shift from large institutionalization to community-based mental health care resulted in drastic funding cuts, and by 1980, the patient population had sunk to about 550. The hospital closed in 2004.

Through enBloom and its team of about a dozen, Howard’s goal is to help Black Americans access a wide toolbox of resources to support their mental health, in addition to seeking medical treatment.

Communities enBloom is one of its programs, which provides low-cost or free pop-up therapy, yoga and acupuncture at wellness events throughout the county, and also creates support groups like a Black women’s circle.

“I know what it feels to not be seen and heard,” says collaborator Chevon Wright, a traveling yoga instructor who often felt discriminated against in all-white classes in Anne Arundel County. “Joi’s goal is necessary. We need more Black and brown spaces in this predominantly white area. ... We want to provide these holistic benefits to all.”

Another program, Schools enBloom, is bringing gardens to local schools, teaching students how to plant herbs and veggies, and about sustainability and the nutritional benefits of locally grown food.

“I want to reclaim the narrative that Black people’s experiences with agriculture began and ended with slavery. That’s not true,” Howard says. “Being in nature is healing. Growing your own food is a skill. Our kids need to be exposed to this.”

She and Therese High, a University of Maryland Extension-trained master gardener, have now spoken at wellness fairs and conferences, and are developing a curriculum for kids of all ages.

“If we can teach children math and English and all of that, we can teach them about their health and well-being,” says High. “Kids are the gateway. How can we show kids that food is medicine and treat it as such? And teach people how to grow their own food?”

Howard is also focused on growing enBloom, which has received several grants to pursue its work. While she hopes some of the Crownsville property will be put in a community land trust, enBloom’s primary goal now is to acquire land to create a small production farm where schoolchildren can learn not only how to grow crops but also how to prepare dishes, and continue to offer pop-up wellness activities throughout the county at libraries, community centers and more.

“Joi is the catalyst,” says High. “She’s such a humble person who allows us all to shine in our own ways. Not a week goes by without her texting me to say, ‘I made a new connection with so-and-so.’ There’s no downtime for her.”

Land would be cheaper in Baltimore or Frederick, but Howard remains committed to her home county, where she is inspired by those who came before her, including her own family members.

More than a decade after he said goodbye to his mother, Robert Dawson Jr. fought injustice on another front. The avid fisherman had taken his young daughters to Sandy Point State Park on the Chesapeake Bay for a beach day—but they were kicked out because they were Black. He joined the NAACP to sue the state, and by 1955, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case, leading to the desegregation of all state recreational facilities.

“People were ready for change,” Howard says. “And I feel the same way now. There’s so much awareness now of the wrongs of the past, and there’s now the attention and resources to rectify it. It’s all coming full circle.” TERP