Two generations of scholarship rightly upended the notion that slavery and segregation left a people crippled by a subordinate place in the social order. Scholarly focus has been on resistance, resilience, and resolve. Yet, while resilient, African Americans were no less vulnerable to depression, psychosis and other expressions of mental illness. Aided by the release of hundreds of files from Central State Hospital in Petersburg, Virginia, Earl Lewis takes a look at post-Civil War African Americans in Virginia struggling to cope with the demons within. In this work, which is part of a larger study of race, mental illness and mental health, he begins to examine the black insane and the institutions that were built to contain them during the formative years of Jim Crow America.