On This Day in NY History, June 1...

1821: Innovative Asylum opens: As part of the New York Hospital’s mental health division, Bloomingdale Asylum opened on June 1, 1821. Its focus was on both studying and treating disorders of the mind. Observing and delving into the mysteries of the mind was a relatively unexplored field of research. One of the first institutions in the country to open this field up; methods focused on moral development, as opposed a commonly held notion that those who were mentally deranged had no hope for recovery and were often housed in prisons. The Bloomingdale Asylum was in operation at 116th and Broadway until 1894. It then moved to White Plains and changed its name to Bloomingdale Hospital.

1909: First Meeting of Future NAACP: The National Negro committee met on May 31 and June 1 in New York. By May 1910, the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) was made a permanent organization. Its mission was to fight against segregation and racial discrimination in sectors like education, jobs, voting, and transportation. Some members of the African-American community disliked the boldly confrontational nature of the organization, such as Booker T. Washington, who preferred quieter, more behind the scenes negotiation. In the education field, for example, the NAACP steadily brought lawsuits in various states to protest the misuse of the “separate but equal” ruling from Plessy v Ferguson, eventually culminating in winning Brown v Board of Education. This ruling opened up desegregation in schools, and led into the civil rights movement.

1956: Dead Sea Scroll Made Public: The New York Times announces that another Dead Sea Scroll had been discovered in a cave in Israel. Two years earlier, an ad in the Wall Street Journal listed four Dead Sea Scrolls for sale. Surrounded by mystery and intrigue, the contents would not be fully revealed until over four decades later. They are written in a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic. The group who worked on the translation was extremely slow, causing them to be replaced around 1990. The new international coalition deciphering the scrolls dealt with internal strife, including the dismissal of the chief editor in December 1990, though they worked quicker than the previous group. Finally, in 2011, the scrolls are available online for anyone to view, in high-resolution images, and text. Along the way, there has been a wide range of speculation about the origin and true contents of the scrolls.