Abstract
Under the Strain of Color is a much-needed addition to the historiography of race and psychiatry in the USA. This is the only book-length treatment of the history of the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the first outpatient psychiatric clinic to serve the most iconic of African-American communities: New York’s Harlem. The little clinic was run by well-trained volunteers, providing low-cost care to an interracial clientele in a church parish house basement between 1946 and 1958. This book’s appearance in print is timely. For over a decade, scholarly interest in this pioneering experiment in antiracist mental health care has been steadily increasing. Over a dozen book chapters and scholarly articles have already been written on this facility. However, most have tended to address only a few aspects of the clinic’s history, especially its patients’ experiences, the staff’s antiracism, and Ralph Ellison’s complex essay on the clinic in his classic Shadow and Act. Thankfully, Mendes’s book is not a rehash of that literature. Instead, it comprehensively addresses two of the less-well understood aspects of the fascinating Lafargue Clinic story: its origin and its contribution to the civil rights movement. In doing so, Mendes has artfully crafted what should become the standard account of this remarkable, short-lived, Cold War-era medical institution.
In many ways, this book is less an institutional history than the most complete reconstruction of the two principal founders’ surprising decision to open a clinic in post-war Harlem. Much has already been written on psychiatrist/public intellectual Fredric Wertham’s and acclaimed novelist Richard Wright’s connections to the clinic. But no one has definitively explained how and why they came to know one another, let alone how or why they even managed to make Lafargue Clinic a reality. Mendes now has. Resurrecting long-lost details culled from archives, private papers and even published works that other historians have neglected, Mendes reveals in Chapters 1–3 how each man became concerned with Black mental health, how the case of convicted murderer Clinton Brewer brought them together, and how even city officials, New Deal liberals and other antiracists stood in their way. In assembling his meticulous social history of the clinic’s founding, he deftly interweaves intellectual history, offering rich, close-readings of Wertham’s and Wright’s writings and correspondence about the Black psyche.
Summoning this textual analysis as his primary evidence, Mendes persuasively argues that Wright and Wertham had developed a perspective on race and psychiatry which was as revolutionary as their Lafargue Clinic. He argues that both men were not only among the first prominent Americans to argue that racism constituted an unjust mental health risk for African Americans, but they were also among the first to claim that psychiatry had a responsibility to combat that social injustice with psychotherapy. In Chapter 4, Mendes even demonstrates that Wertham and Lafargue brought this model of antiracist social psychiatry to bear in helping the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund to successfully fight school segregation in the courts. In an even more brilliant stroke, he also convincingly argues that Frederic Wertham’s infamous crusade against comic books as a potential cause of juvenile delinquency was not separate from his fight against racism. From Wertham’s historical perspective, both segregated schools and racist imagery in the mass media did a kind of psychological violence to children, causing unnecessary stress and anxiety, especially for Black children.
To explain why Wertham and Wright were able to develop this uniquely radical point of view, Mendes cleverly seizes upon their shared position as outsiders. Wright was a southern Black migrant, ex-Communist and expatriate. Wertham was a German-Jewish immigrant and a professional gypsy/malcontent within US psychiatry. Mendes argues that men familiar with migration and marginalization could best understand the inner life of African Americans transplanted from the Jim Crow South, struggling to survive in Northern urban ghettos. What is more, as liminal figures, the Lafargue co-founders never fully became part of any one professional, social, or geographic community. As perennial outsiders, Wertham and Wright were able to imagine alternatives to existing social institutions. In presenting Lafargue’s founders in this way, Under the Strain of Color reinforces the work that Nayan Shah and other historians have done on 20th-century US migrations and dislocations, demonstrating that migrant workers and other transients were able to forge daring new kinds of relationships and practices in the interstices of the communities they briefly inhabited.
This crisply written story of two compelling, iconoclastic individuals who did not quite fit into their time and place is also bound to hook undergraduates and general readers delighted by tales of the unexpected. A slim volume that is jargon-free and as entertaining as a novel, I can see it widening the audience for both medical humanities and the history of psychiatry. But a word of warning: this is not a dispassionate work. Mendes does appear to sympathize with Wertham. He presents the Lafargue Clinic model of socially progressive psychiatry as an alternative to the cultural competency outcomes model that most US health care institutions and schools promote. Nonetheless, Under the Strain of Color is a well-researched, important and insightful work deserving a wide readership.