Bryce Hospital Farm Colony for Negroes

The Bryce Hospital Farm Colony for Negroes was the largest state operated labor center for mentally ill Black patients in Alabama. Located on lands west of present-day Tuscaloosa National Airport in Northport, Tuscaloosa County, it was a 3,000-acre plantation where as many as 240 Black men and women who had been deemed mentally ill lived and worked from 1927 until 1969. The Colony helped relieve overcrowding at the all-Black Searcy Hospital in Mount Vernon, Mobile County, which was established in 1900 and opened in 1902. However, the Colony’s primary purpose was to use the labor of Black patients to produce foodstuffs and cash crops to support Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County.

Bryce Hospital, which was established in 1852 as the Alabama Insane Hospital, opened in 1861 with physician Peter Bryce as superintendent. Searcy Hospital was established at the Mount Vernon Armory as the Mount Vernon Hospital for the Colored Insane and was later named for James T. Searcy, superintendent of Alabama’s state hospitals.

The Colony was the second Black patient labor center created by Bryce Hospital authorities. The first was established in 1902, when nearly all of the hospital’s Black patients were sent 200 miles south by train to be admitted to newly opened Searcy Hospital. Superintendent Searcy kept 60 Black patients behind as laborers. Bryce Hospital maintained a group of Black patient-laborers for some 60 years. Living at the back of the hospital property, they worked in the hospital’s laundry and farmed its fields.

The first Black patients were brought to the Colony from Searcy Hospital in December 1927.  The only provision that the state made for housing or accommodating them was to convert cheaply constructed old buildings that were already on the property. These were considered fire hazards. Finally, in 1939, the Colony’s residents were moved into the Jemison Building, a new three-story brick dormitory named in honor of Robert Jemison Jr., a Civil War-era businessman and politician who, as a state senator, lobbied successfully for Tuscaloosa as the site of Alabama’s first institution for the mentally ill. The Colony lands were once part of Cherokee Place, Jemison’s 4,000-acre plantation, where as many as 120 enslaved people lived and worked.

For those who were sent to the Colony, the only “treatment” was farm labor or work in the Colony’s laundry and kitchen. The 1930 Census lists 134 “inmates” at the Colony: 97 men and 37 women. Unlike Bryce Hospital, which employed numerous support staff, the only other residents at the Colony were four Black attendants and Vaughn Robertson, a 25-year-old White man, who was the Colony’s farm manager. In the Census, each of the male patients is designated as a farm laborer, while the female patients performed laundry work, cooked, scrubbed, milked cows, and did field work. The annual hospital superintendents’ reports from the 1940s and 1950s include photographs of White Bryce Hospital patients engaged in recreational activities or seated in dining halls, whereas all of the Colony patients are shown performing farm labor.  

During a 1948 inspection tour of the Colony, led by Alabama State Senator Albert Patterson, the Colony’s farm supervisor told the group that the Colony’s residents were better satisfied when they were working. He said that, when bad weather prevented outside work, he allowed them to leave the barn for an hour or two. The inspection report also revealed that the nine-year-old Jemison Building was in poor condition, with water running down the walls and falling plaster. In addition, Colony patients were fed an inadequate diet. Nonetheless, the mentally ill men and women who lived under these conditions produced substantial benefits for the state of Alabama. Through 1954, the value of the cotton, hay, meat, milk, eggs, and food crops produced by these unpaid patient-laborers totaled more than $2.3 million, approximately $37 million today.  

The Colony was not a hospital, but rather a labor center. During the years that the Colony was in operation, work was seen as a therapeutic element in the treatment of those with mental illness. Black patients at Searcy Hospital and White patients at Bryce were employed in a variety of capacities. However, even against this backdrop, the manner in which Black patients were used at the Colony stands out as an example of separate and unequal treatment during the Jim Crow era in Alabama. 

To replenish the two Black labor pools, hospital officials routinely moved patients north from Searcy Hospital to work at the Colony or at the Bryce labor center, while sending back south those who were no longer able to work. From 1905 to 1956, more than 1,400 Black patients were transferred from Searcy to the Colony or to Bryce, and more than 400 were sent south to Searcy Hospital. The difference between these numbers reflects patient deaths and discharges and an overall increase in the populations at the Colony and Bryce Hospital labor centers. Some of those patients endured multiple moves during their lifetimes. A woman identified as Georgia W. was at Mount Vernon in 1920, the Colony in 1930, and Bryce Hospital in 1950. She was later sent back to Searcy Hospital, where she died on April 15, 1966, when she was 82 years old.   

In 1962, Bryce Hospital opened a 160-bed hospital on the Colony property, not far from the Jemison Building. Treatment Center Number Two admitted mentally ill Black patients from Alabama’s north and north-central counties. Some of those who labored at the Colony spent their final days in the new hospital.

Alabama’s use of Black patient labor centers came to an end following the 1969 federal court ruling in Marable v. Alabama Mental Health Board. It compelled the state of Alabama to desegregate its state hospitals for the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled. The Colony was then converted to house elderly patients. White and Black patients living in the racially integrated hospitals continued to engage in agricultural work, but this practice was short-lived. The 1972 federal court ruling in Wyatt v. Stickney required the hospitals to pay all working patients in accordance with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Unable to afford the cost of compliance, Alabama ended the use of patient labor on its hospital farms in 1977.