This article tells the story of the racialized workspaces specific to black and white patients in the psychiatric hospitals and asylums of the US South between 1870 and 1910. Using two archival materials collected at the Cen- tral State Asylum for Colored Insane, Virginia, and the Central Louisiana State Hospital founded in Pineville, Louisiana, 1906, this essay studies the way the treatments of black behaviors by “therapeutic” work were set up and implemented in these new segregated spaces.