Their graves were marked only by numbers. She fought to find their names.
Annapolis historian Janice Hayes-Williams has worked since 2001 to recover the names of more than 1,700 people buried at Crownsville, once Maryland’s only mental hospital for Black patients.


Janice Hayes-Williams has worked to have a memorial built to honor people buried in a cemetery on ground that was once Crownsville Hospital Center, a mental hospital for Black Marylanders. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

By Joe Heim
August 29, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

In a shaded Maryland cemetery 30 miles east of Washington, there are rows and rows and rows of small stone slabs lying flat on the ground, each marked with a number.

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From the first day she saw the Crownsville cemetery, {Annapolis historian Janice Hayes-Williams} wanted to find out whose lives belonged to those numbered stones. And she wanted a memorial displaying those names. A memorial that allowed the dead to tell their stories; to say, at the very least, that they had lived.

“This is a cemetery,” she said, standing in the middle of the graveyard, holding her arms out wide. “You can’t give honor to people if you don’t know who’s there.” ... Recovering those names became a goal she would pursue for the next two decades.

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‘Maryland’s Shame’

Founded in rural Anne Arundel County in 1911 as the Hospital for the Negro Insane, Crownsville made its first patients construct its earliest buildings. Labor was deemed therapeutic — not to mention free — and those sent to the hospital were often tasked with such jobs as building, cleaning, planting and harvesting crops, weaving baskets and sewing clothes.

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By Joe Heim
Joe Heim joined The Washington Post in 1999. He is a staff writer for the Metro section. Twitter