Daniel McDonald
This morning, the national audience of NBC’s Today show was made aware of the restoration of one of Milledgeville’s most hidden secrets.
Recently, a television crew from Today’s American Story with Bob Dotson traveled to Milledgeville to film the story of former Central State Hospital employee Casey McClain’s discovery that her grandfather, “Papa Williams,” whom she had never known during his lifetime, is one of the tens of thousands of deceased mental health consumers buried in one of Central State Hospital’s cemeteries.
But more than the story of one family’s multi-generational connection to Central State, this American Story speaks to the growing movement of people working to restore the human dignity of those persons who, because of the diagnosis of a mental health issue or developmental disability, were swept out of society’s consciousness during their own lives and almost completely forgotten in their passing.
Former Central State Hospital employees Bud and Janice Merritt first learned about Central State Hospital’s forgotten cemeteries when they found what appeared to be a burial site amongst the kudzu and dead growth on the hospital’s sprawling campus while out rambling one day during the early 1990s.
Since that time, their discovery has turned into a journey to reclaim the lives and identities of those people who met their end while being cared for in the State of Georgia’s massive mental health system. On the Central State Hospital campus, that journey has resulted in the restoration of three of the hospital’s five cemeteries and their placement on the National Register of Historic Places.
But more importantly, the Merritts say their discovery has helped form the genesis of a national movement to memorialize the lives and deaths of this nation’s mental health consumers that may soon take tangible form in a monument on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
“I’m an advocate from the hospital’s side of things; I’ve acted as a liaison and helped coordinate efforts to get the cemeteries on the National Register [of Historic Places],” Bud Merritt said. “But most of the emphasis and credit needs to go to the groups of volunteers composed of former mental health patients who’ve advocated for the cemeteries. Without their efforts and persistence, a lot of this never would have happened.”
In the almost two decades since the Merritts stumbled upon the forgotten remnants of one of three cemeteries that have since been restored on Central State’s campus, the Merritts say that other states have begun to realize the injustices experienced by mental health consumers during their lives, and how those injustices continued in their deaths.
“Many states are finding neglected cemeteries at the sites of their mental health hospitals,” Bud Merritt said. “In some cases, they are finding the forgotten ashes of deceased patients in boxes in their basements.”
Merritt said he does not think that the people who worked with mental health consumers in the past were intentionally acting in a way that was cruel or violated consumers’ civil rights. He said they were acting within the socially accepted norms of the time.
“If you don’t value a person in life, how are you going to treat them in death?” he asked.
But Merritt said the cemeteries found on Central State’s campus weren’t constructed or consumers’ burials carried out in an ill-conceived manner. He talks about the strange peculiarities of the pre-Civil Rights era South that can be found in the plotting of the burial sites.
One cemetery for African-American consumers was moved in 1939 to make way for the construction of the Rivers complex. Merritt said the deceased consumers were methodically reinterred and detailed records kept about their new resting places.
“It’s interesting to me that in 1939, in the Deep South, the effort was made to reinter all these African-Americans’ graves in good order,” he said.
But sometime during the years that followed, those cemeteries were completely forgotten. The Merritts said they interviewed scores of people in all departments of Central State in an attempt to learn more about the hospital’s cemeteries, but no matter where they turned, no one knew any more than they did.
“There are a lot of people you’d have thought would have known,” Janice Merritt said. “But nobody seemed to know a thing.”
But Bud Merritt said that it is the dedication of those people who have utilized the services of the mental health system, those people that could have shared the fate of consumers who turn toward eternity from the cemeteries at Central State that have helped put this struggle on the map.
“These are their brothers and sisters,” he said. “This is their Arlington [Cemetery].”
In 2000, the State of Georgia apologized to mental health consumers and their families for neglecting the cemeteries at Central State hospital and promised never to let their fiduciary responsibility over the cemeteries lapse again.
Merritt said it was an emotional moment that helped focus a movement of mental health advocates on what is possible. And the Merritts believe that Bob Dotson’s American Story will bring more Americans around to those possibilities as well.
To view the story at www.msnbc.com, visit the following web link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31127332/
