Bronx Zoo operator apologizes for putting black man on display in its monkey house

The Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Bronx zoo, one of the most famous zoos in the world, has issued an apology for placing an African man on display in a monkey house in 1906.

In the “name of equality, transparency, and accountability, we must confront our organization’s historic role in promoting racial injustice,” the WCS said in a statement.

The zoo put a young African man from the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, on display in a monkey house in September, 1906.

“His name was Ota Benga,” the statement read. Bronx Zoo officials “put Ota Benga on display in the zoo’s Monkey House for several days during the week of September 8, 1906, before outrage from local Black ministers quickly brought the disgraceful incident to an end.”

One of those ministers, the Rev. James Gordon, “arranged for Ota Benga to stay at an orphanage he directed in Weeksville, Brooklyn.”

“Robbed of his humanity and unable to return home,” he died by suicide a decade later.

All the available records on Ota are being made online by the WCS. It is to “publicly acknowledge the mistakes of our past,” the society’s statement read.

It also denounced the “eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism, writings, and philosophies” furthered by two of its founders: Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn. Grant wrote an infamous eugenics book, ‘The Passing of the Great Race,’ with the preface by Osborn. 

The book was submitted as a defence exhibit for Nazi doctor and Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt. He was the co-head of Third Reich’s ‘euthanasia’ program. Convicted of war crimes, he was put to death in 1948.