“A valuable contribution to the history of mental health care and of the racist applications of medicine.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This a huge piece of work and a profoundly great book.”

—Dorothy Allison, author, Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedwellers
“a must-read for every mental health professional in the United States. No exceptions.”

—Julian Adler, Center for Court Innovation, author, Start Here

“a monumental and compelling book … grounded strongly in mastery of literatures of psychiatry and race.”

—David Roediger, Foundation Distinguished Professor, University of Kansas, author, How Race Survived History
“In a gripping narrative, Segrest retells southern history through the experiences of patients committed to the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum . . . She gives voice to the 25,000 unclaimed bodies that still lie in unmarked graves. It’s an astonishing and compelling feat.”

—Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, C. Vann Woodward Professor of History Emeritus, Yale
“Professor Segrest's meticulous research foregrounds the shameful connections between white supremacy, Cherokee removal, slavery, patriarchy, and the psychiatric profession over the past century and a half in the South . . . Since prisons and jails are now the major sites for psychiatric ‘care,’ the book is an urgent call as well for prison reform.”

—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Spelman College, co-author of Gender Talk
"Mab Segrest’s book is extraordinary. It is a ‘political memoir’ but its language is poetic and its tone passionate. I started it with caution and finished it with awe and pleasure."

—Howard Zinn
“Segrest's reflections are 'exceptionally' chilling, fresh, and urgent. A lucid, passionate, and necessary memoir, then and now.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Courageous and daring, this work testifies/documents that political solidarity, forged in struggle, can exist across differences.”

—bell hooks

MAB SEGREST

ACTIVIST • WRITER • TEACHER

The arc of Mab Segrest’s work spans forty years and profound cultural shifts, the resolution of which still hangs in perilous balance.

In 1984, the poet Adrienne Rich wrote about Mab Segrest’s first book, My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, proclaiming, “Mab Segrest is of a younger generation than I, another kind of family. But her essays speak to the whispers in my bones, and they both remind and instruct me. To understand this country, we need to know the American South from the perspective of those who, like Margaret Walker, like Mab Segrest, have lived real lives there all along.” In 2020, Segrest is back with a reissue of her classic anti-racist text Memoir of a Race Traitor: Fighting Racism in the American South and an epic new volume, Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry from Georgia’s Milledgeville Asylum. This in-depth asylum study is already being hailed as a landmark of scholarship, a “profoundly great book,” and a “gripping” and “compelling” and “monumental” narrative.

MAB SEGREST

ACTIVIST • WRITER • TEACHER

Mab Segrest reveals story behind her book, Memoir of a Race Traitor.

Administrations of Lunacy

Memoir of a Race Traitor

Born to Belonging

My Mama’s Dead Squirrel

Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray!