County Executive Steuart Pittman ensured Anne Arundel County acquired the former Crownsville Hospital Complex, including the cemetery, from the State of Maryland in December 2022. “While there’s been some telling of Black History, it’s never enough,” the elected official told Annapolis Moms Media. “So the locations where things have happened where we can [memorialize] and explain what happened, we’ve been doing that all over the county. [The Memorial Plaza] will be striking… and you can experience the names of the actual names of the people buried there and then you can walk up to where the actual [numbered] stones are. I think that experience will be very dramatic.” Senator Edward Riley, also known as Big Ed, wrote a bond bill to help get funding for the memorial. Community volunteer Phillip Cline has been there every step of the way making sure all things regarding the construction of the memorial are going smoothly and being done properly.
Janice and her friend Scottie hosted the first Say My Name Ceremony in 2004. With the help of various volunteers, Janice had successfully identified all of the people buried in the Crownsville Patient Cemetery by 2022. While doing her research, the historian discovered that the deceased weren’t just locals. They represented 24 states and 4 countries. Crownsville was an international part of history. of the property have been happening for years, but the book Madness by NBC Correspondent Antonia Talks of the history and transformation Hylton gave Crownsville national attention. The author’s message about the importance of knowing the history of Crownsville Hospital was similar to Janice’s: learning from it. “I think the [book’s] major message for me is…what seems to make the difference for [mental health] patients is whether or not they have a community to come home to,” Antonia told me in a previous interview. “A community with clinics, social supports, and doctors who love them and look like them and believe in them, whether they have relatives
Say My Name Sculpture by Jimmy Howard: Photo by Stacey Coles
For Janice, identifying and now preserving the names of the 1727 patients buried on the Crownsville Hospital grounds is about bringing peace to the souls who experienced so much horror while living. Built on the backs of its first patients in 1911, Crownsville Hospital is where experimentation, racism, mental health, misdiagnosis, criminalization, and more collided until its closure in July 2004. For many of its patients, checking into Crownsville Hospital meant never checking out. They died there, often alone. Burials at Crownsville Patient Cemetery stopped in 1968. 1 Many of their graves had only been marked with numbers.
who will support them, wrap their arms around them, have their back…those things are often the difference between life or death, between success and failure, between rehabilitation and recidivism.” Unfortunately, during her work, Janice also discovered that every patient who died (within the timeframe that burials were taking place at the cemetery) wasn’t laid to rest. Somewhere around 500 patients were sent to the University of Maryland for students to use as experimental cadavers. In their honor, artist Jimmy Howard crafted a wooden sculpture from a tree removed from the land that will be unveiled later this year.
Following the hospital’s closure and amid years of combing through Maryland State Archives to identify the deceased,
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