Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
History
Advisor
Gerald Markowitz
Committee Members
Andreas Killen
Tanisha Ford
Samuel Kelton Roberts
Subject Categories
African American Studies | American Politics | Digital Humanities | Disability Studies | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Medical Humanities | Philosophy of Science | Psychiatric and Mental Health | Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing | Public Health | Social History | Social Justice | United States History | Women's History | Women's Studies
Keywords
Bioethics, Black Freedom Movement, Carceral Studies, Disability Studies, Female Activism, History of Medicine, Institutional Racism, Medical Civil Rights, Psychiatry, Social Justice
Abstract
This dissertation examines the psychiatric conditions experienced by African American patients at the South Carolina State Hospital (SCSH) and the activism of Modjeska Simkins in exposing systemic racism within the institution. Although Simkins secured her legacy in South Carolina’s civil rights struggle through key contributions to Briggs v. Elliott and Brown v. Board of Education, she remains understudied in the historiography of Black Public Health. Drawing on Simkins’s personal archive, previously unexamined hospital records, manuscript sources from the Governor of South Carolina, medical journals, and contemporary newspapers, this study offers both institutional and biographical analyses grounded in the history of medicine. Viewing the built environment as a central mode of subjugation, it demonstrates South Carolina’s racialized social hierarchy as manifested inside the SCSH, where the hospital’s functioning depended on African American patient-laborers held in servitude for the benefit of white patients and the state. The project also critically reassesses the thirty-year tenure of Superintendent William S. Hall – a celebrated medical figure enshrined in the South Carolina Hall of Fame – documenting programmatic racial inequity and neglect through misappropriated federal funds, medical experimentation without consent, and decades of cover-ups and concealment from federal officials. Tracing Simkins’s medical activism from her 1930s tuberculosis outreach to the 1965 federal campaign to desegregate the SCSH, this research reveals the ways in which a Black woman without formal medical training transformed psychiatric care by forcing compliance with the Civil Rights Act amid a cacophony of complaints from Black and white patients alike. Finally, the study connects psychiatric deinstitutionalization and racial desegregation to mass incarceration through the state’s repurposing of SCSH hospital facilities as private, for-profit prisons in which much the same racialized neglect persists to today.
Recommended Citation
Pelletier, Bradford Charles, "Treating “Endemic Neglect”: Race, Psychiatry, and Modjeska Simkins’s Fight for Medical Civil Rights at the South Carolina State Hospital (1910-1985)" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6375
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Politics Commons, Digital Humanities Commons, Disability Studies Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Medical Humanities Commons, Philosophy of Science Commons, Psychiatric and Mental Health Commons, Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing Commons, Public Health Commons, Social History Commons, Social Justice Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons, Women's Studies Commons
