African Was Shown as a Darwinian ‘Specimen’ : Racism: Book tells of events that led to suicide of Congolese Pygmy who was exhibited at 1904 World’s Fair and at Bronz Zoo as proof of man’s relation to apes.

The 1904 World’s Fair championed America’s flowering innovation and industrial muscle, but it also displayed an African man--proof, it was said, of man’s relation to the apes.

Twelve years later that man, a Pygmy from the Congolese bush, built a fire, danced around it and put a bullet through his heart.

In between, Ota Benga became an unwitting emblem for a nation enthralled by science and discovery and gripped by racism.

The low point was a publicity stunt staged by the operator of the Bronx Zoo in 1906, in which Ota Benga was displayed in a cage with an orangutan. Huge crowds came to see Ota Benga, with teeth filed pointy and the cage strewn with bones to suggest cannibalism.

“The Pygmy was not much taller than the orangutan and one had a good opportunity to study their points of resemblance,” reported The New York Times. “Their heads are much alike and both grin in the same way when pleased.”

A new book co-authored by the grandson of the naturalist and explorer who brought Ota Benga to America chronicles the African’s sad, strange journey, from the bush to the grounds of the black seminary in Lynchburg where he died.

“Ota Benga was caught in this search among explorers and scientists who were looking for the missing link,” outlined by Charles Darwin, said author Phillips Verner Bradford.

“At the fair my grandfather, in a moment of zeal, advertised that the ape’s next of kin was on display, although I don’t think he really believed it.”

As an old man, Samuel Phillips Verner cried publicly over Ota Benga’s treatment, Bradford said. “He repented, said it was all a mistake. Of course, he didn’t know Ota Benga was going to kill himself.”

Ota Benga was one of a group of African Pygmies brought for display at the 1904 fair in St. Louis.

In addition to locomotives, automobiles and exotic animals, the fair organizers displayed about 1,400 native people from around the globe, including the American Indian chief Geronimo.

The scientific idea behind these displays, as stated by the fair’s chief anthropologist, was to show that whites were farther evolved on the Darwinian scale.

After the fair closed, Verner and Ota Benga traveled through Africa together, gathering plant and animal specimens that would later become part of the Smithsonian Institution collections.

In 1906, the two made their way to New York. Out of money, Verner dropped Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo, where he was to live in a forest that was not part of the exhibit area.

Instead, the zookeeper moved Ota Benga to the ape house.

“Ota Benga: The Pygmy In The Zoo,” published by St. Martin’s Press, contains a letter from the head of the New York Colored Baptist Ministers’ Conference:

“Our race is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”

The black ministers eventually prevailed on the mayor to release Ota Benga. He did a stint in a Brooklyn orphanage, where the chaperones tried without success to deter the 25-year-old man’s interest in the teen-age girls also housed there. In 1908 the ministers sent Ota Benga to live at the Virginia Seminary and be tutored by the poet and educator Anne Spencer.

Her small Lynchburg house was a salon for black leaders from W.E.B. Du Bois to Martin Luther King, said Tom Ledford, director of the Lynchburg museum system. “It probably seemed like a natural place to bring him,” Ledford said.

“We knew him as Otto Bingo,” said Chauncey Spencer, 85, the poet’s son and one of a group of boys who attended classes with Ota Benga.

Ota Benga began to learn more about what had happened to him, and he gradually came to resent his display in St. Louis and in New York, Bradford said.

But when he ventured out into strictly segregated Lynchburg, especially to a white working-class neighborhood called Cottontown, he was called names and once was hit by a rock, Spencer said.

“He would come back and ask why they did that. He didn’t understand.”

Ota Benga left no suicide note, but Bradford believes one reason he killed himself was because life as an American black seemed bleak.