When he lived in a week cell, so thank you all for being here. So black lives matter its a centuriesold cry of the dogged plea over farflung people is what was conveyed to Thomas Jefferson in 1791 when a council quote it is the indispensable duty of those who maintained for themselves the rights of human nature to extend their power and influence to the relief of every part of the union race. Its what inspired my research into the story of ota benga who in 1906 garner global headlines after he was exhibited in the bronx zoo monkey house at times with an orangutan. But why some ask would a disgrace african who did not leave behind any records nor perform any remarkable feats merit a biography. When i began my research five years ago i could not know that some would see his life as a metaphor for black lives today. But i somehow knew that his story mattered that how he came to be so monumentally degraded in a worldclass city at the dawn of the 20th century during the progressive era mattered. So i began to explore at this historical case by interrogating what had already been written. I began with a book published in 1992 that had for many become the definitive account of ota bengas light. Ota benga was written by Philip Werner redford the grandson of the african explorer who brought ota benga to the United States. According to the introduction the book was the story of friendship between ota benga and samuel werner. From the first few pages i was intrigued by the notion that werner had forged a friendship with his african subject who then somehow ended up in a zoo being displayed with apes. The color color for narrative was akin to the tale of Robinson Crusoe and his sidekick friday but had no citations and was almost entirely based on verners uncorroborated accounts. The book nonetheless etched verners tale of friendship into ota benga within the history. I sought out other sources. I turned to the Wildlife ConservationSociety Better known as the bronx zoo. It had recorded sub fives exhibition. The plot fit in. Gathering of animals in an conventional history of the new York Zoological SocietyFirst Published in 1974 explores the history of the zoo beginning with its creation in 1899. In recounting the episode William Bridges assumes curator publications contended that it was unlikely that benga had been displayed in caged at all. Quote was ota benga exhibited like some strange rare animal he asked. That he was locked behind bars in the bear cage to be stared at during certain hours seems unlike leahy said. Patently ignoring evidence in the Zoological Society archives there verified ota bengas daily exhibition in the cage at specific times of the day. Then any purported effort to clarify what had transpired, bridges claimed that benga had entered a cage to play with the chimpanzees that accompanied from africa quote information about him was hung on the cage when he was in it. He concluded quote at this distance and time that is about all that can be said for sure except that it was all done with the best of intentions for ota benga was interesting to the new york public that had not been privileged to see bengas vernas. I soon learned his bewildering suggestion of doubt defied any faithful reading of the archival records. Bengas exhibition in a bear cage be stared at during certain hours is unequivocally documented in newspaper articles correspondence and in a published article in the Zoological Societys own journal. This was just one of many examples of deception i discovered by her chest and custodian of history. Meanwhile, the voluminous archival records that expose key aspects of ota bengas life in the circumstances of his capturing captivity have largely gone untouched. We visited this for a rare look at the fickleness of history and raises troubling questions about what we know and what we think we know about our past. While ota benga did not leave behind his own papers others including Samuel Verner did. Mountains of archival records, ship passenger records newspaper magazine articles anthropological census data photographs recorded recollections of those who knew ota benga and the era enabled me to retrace bengas footsteps through the congo europe and the United States and what i discovered exceeded my worst suspicions about his relationship with Samuel Verner. In the process i was able to see ever more clearly how the Racial Attitudes of new york citys social elite were embedded in scholarship, Government Policies and Popular Culture and why some of those attitudes lingers still but first a little bit about Samuel Verner. He was the first child of the slaveholding family in South Carolina who came of age during the virulent backlash to the gains that blacks had made during reconstruction. In about white supremacist he went to the congo as a missionary and then as a man determined to make his fortune in a country that was being plundered by king leopold the second. As millions of congolese were being enslaved and murdered or maimed under the guise of civilized man verner left his mission posts capitalizing on the turmoil there. In 1904 verner return returned to the congo as a special agent for the worlds fair. His assignment was to bring back socalled pygmies to exhibit at the fair. Fair organizers hoped to map Human Progress from the lowest to the highest civilizations was socalled pygmies didnt diminutive people of the Central African forest deemed the least civilized. Heavily armed and with the approval of king leopold and u. S. Government officials verner went hunting for the pygmies. Benga was the first of its captives in which he wrote an article entitled my untold adventures while hunting pygmies in the congo. In lectures and articles verner promoted ota benga is a cannibal noting his pointed teeth which in reality were fashionable across the congo. Two years later verner temporarily housed or turned benga over to the bronx zoo where he was exhibited in the monkey house in september of 1906. Buschmann shares a cage with bronx apes was the headline in the New York Times on september 9, 1906. Tens of thousands of new yorkers flocked to the zoo to see sub by this esol and they sat and stupefied silence. Ministers protest fell on deaf ears. Maya mcclellan refused to meet with the ministers are intervene intervene. The Zoological Society secretary Madison Grant also held firm. Zoo director William Hornaday the blessings of his elite superiors was defined same the exhibit would go on as the sun that quote each afternoon in september. Ota benga he insisted quote had the best room in the monkey house. New york times editors were dismayed by the protest. They rode quote we do not understand all the emotion which others are expressing in a matter. Ota benga according to our information is a normal specimen of this race or tribe but the brand is much developed as are those of his other members whether they held to the illustrations of arrested development and really closer to the apes than the other african savages or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendents of ordinary blacks they are of equal interest to the student of acknowledging and can be studied with profit back. It was bengas resistance resistance to captivity that ultimately convinced of zoo officials that he was too much to handle. He was finally in test and trust the care of reverend james gordon at the orphanage asylum hearing or glenn. Spectacle recounts bengas stay in weeks fill his journey to ensberg virginia and the return to the orphanage farm in long island where he lived a lonely life at st. James. In 1910 he returned to lynchburg where he worked on a tobacco farm and did odd jobs. He also became a beloved companion to neighborhood children to whom he talked the ways of the forest Hunting Fishing picking berries and roots. In lynchburg he was embraced by the towns black community that included and spencer who would go on to become an acclaimed poet and have actually done ota bengas teacher at the seminary. He would spend his final years trying to find his way back home or trying to adjust to american life. So i will read a small excerpt from that period in lynchburg where he bonded with a group of voice including and spencer sund chauncy. In lynchburg benga had found a surrogate home and family and would learn their customs and the contours and boundaries of the binding blackness. When he crossed into neighboring cottonwood to white workingclass community he was heckled and pelted with rocks. He would come back and ask why they did that chauncy recalled years later. He didnt understand. However long before he arrived in Lynchburg Ota benga had seen the scallops horn on the faces of the congo and the jeering crowds in st. Louis and among the spectators outside the cage at the monkey house. He learned learn to live within the carefully drawn lines of lynchburgs black community and practice customs that people are crafted from memory centuriesold oppression. Their sermons and spiritual city may have recognized the sorrow as familiar as the forestry. They were the descendents of the people who knew the despair of displacement and the loss of language and friendships family rituals sites scents and sounds. If my daughter is here she is about to say there she goes again. Shes about to cry. These people cobbled together from afar continent made a new rebuked and scorned and yet gerrer him to their bosom. Some have lost loved ones to slavery, some board the children of their flavors yet withal the travails they had made room for homeless stranger. Benga had only memories and no one but he could no what form they took. Was he asleep troubled by nightmares of being stalked by howling mobs are being cage with its . Was a haunted by visions of murdered loved ones or chained congolese . Did he drift into gatherings of canon clan only to wake of the loan . Some nights beneath the star speckled sky the boys would watch benga build a fire and dance and sing around it. Chauncey gregory bull of britain and their friends were enraptured as they circled the flame hopping and singing as if they werent there. There were no older than 10 too young to grasp the poignancy of the ancient ritual with the urgency of bengas refrains and i will end there and take your questions. Thank you. [applause] does no one have questions . You have all read the book . I have heard a little bit about this on abc world news last night. I was up last night doing it. I fell asleep new knowing it was coming today. What eventually happened to him . He took his life. I should have said spoiler alert alert. His age is contested. Samuel verner offered many different ages for him. He offered many different accounts of how he was captured and tamed or whatever the word is. But from the best evidence available if anyone has a copy of the book if you look at that picture that picture was taken two years before he was exhibited in the bronx zoo. Here is he is clearly a child and later in his life he said that he was 13 when he was captured, which would mean when he was in the bronx zoo he would have been 15 and when he died he would have been 25. Good evening. I want to thank you so botched for shining a light on this young man. Also do you have books today for sale . Yes, i hope so. Wonderful and then another question is what was life like for him and the Howard Collier orphanage where they turned children inmates and that type of thing . Well it was a lot better than being in the bronx zoo monkey house and he was given his own room where he could smoke and do pretty much what he wanted that of course he was still isolated from the children. He could not have real human interactions with people. He was still alienated from his country and his people. He had limited english. At that time he said he spoke maybe 100 words so he wanted to go home. That is what he wanted. He wanted to go home but it seemed that they were very nice to him. Mary gordon who was the house mother was described in every account i have ever read of her as very maternal, very warm and loving and she was really beloved by the children they are long after they left. They would still refer to her as mama. [inaudible] i dont know if you address of the new book that winter of examples of this . Didnt the chicago worlds fair have ethnic exhibits . They were called human human zoos that they think the difference between what was very popular particularly in europe at the time of the century and at the close of the 19th century human zoos were very popular with primitive people that they were people exhibited with people. Ota benga was exhibited with an orangutan and with monkeys in a monkey house. So it was up to the spectator to decide whether or not he was fully human. Hi. I have heard of ota benga as a youngster and i want to know what does that reveal in psychology of how people viewed him and did they actually think he was a monkey . For some reason i never loved zoos and thats particularly so when i went to the monkey house. If you look at a monkeys and a look at the apes there seems to be some recognition. What are you looking at . You know i always felt really uneasy when i made eye contact because they are so intelligent. So if you think about our ability to look at caged animals who are highly intelligent pigs are highly intelligent. But look what we do to them so if people are not fully convinced that he is human its the same thing. So i dont think they thought he was a full human being. They thought he was subhuman because why else would he be in a cage in the monkey house . Good evening. I want to thank you for doing this. This story resonated with me because it makes me wonder sometimes on any given sunday, i go to church in harlem and every time i go to church their size a crowd of tourists lined up and they are taking photos. I always wonder is there a correlation there in research . Have you seen anything that proves or shows this fascination with seeing i guess si would say what black people or maybe in this case we were talking in terms of primitive people being seen as objects so being objectified . Once you discard or diminish someones humanity and objective by them than you can make a spectacle of them. You couldnt really do it unless he you are crazy to a person to someone that you recognize as a human being. Since these ideas of black life were not just the ideas of marginalized crack pots, this was rooted in science that blacks were at degenerative race, that they were closer to apes than other human beings and for so long that idea have circulated in the highest echelons of the academy. It should be no surprise that 100 years later while you would not or i hope you wouldnt see a black person exhibited in a zoo but there are some of those subconscious biases that may explain this rash of Police Killings of unarmed black voice in men who were being shot in the back people being riddled with bullets while you sit in your car. I dont think its a conscious thing but when you have those kinds of ideas so deeply embedded in everything that america is it really should not surprise us that some of those ideas are lingering but they have morphed and taken on new forms. Thanks so much for this book. I have read a great portion of it and its fantastic. He has from medgar evers the center for black history. Please talk about some of the challenges you had in your research because i find it very fascinating. The challenge is psychologically . And the research itself. The research was challenging as you can well imagine. Doing research on marginalized people is like really tests your chops as a researcher. I had some experience because my last book letters from black america was all about going into the archives and looking for letters that many people didnt think slaves wrote letters or the enslaved i should say. People from all walks of life wrote letters and black people always wrote letters so there is just this, because our lives are not considered meaningful its harder to find evidence of our lives. Going into the archives i couldnt go into the archives up with whole papers of ota benga so you have to look in unexpected places and you have to look harder and you have to go to the people who kept him. You have to go wherever you think there may be something. After a while the interesting thing about this project, while it was so horrid the first two years and at one point i thought i may have to give the money back. Im not going to be able to do this. Its too hard. Things just started tumbling out of closets. Its like when you look so long its like you hit something and then it started unfolding. I felt like i was being stalked by a ota benga. Look there are, oh no what they are. I was having these incredible finds. I couldnt have even imagined that i would be able to literally trace his footsteps on her almost daily basis in 1904 in 1905, in 1906. I could never have anticipated the kind of detail that i was able to get of his life. Thats because the elite people of new york society kept a lot of records. They didnt feel the need to hide anything because who was going to look for the life of ota benga wax they didnt see me coming. A pleasant good evening. Really appreciate you taking the time out of your life to put this together and to bring ota benga to light and i guess this isnt one question, its a bunch of things. I understand the climate of this nation, that climate of this work and how peoples of this world somehow end up all pressed an understanding that me being a man and compounding that together and reading this book what should it do for me . This might be an obvious question but i would like you to articulate that. I think what it might do for you first of all it substantiates suspicions many of us had that this stuff is not just happenstance. Its deeply deeply deeplyrooted. So much of the scholarship is kind of not out there circulating so we all have a feeling about things but then you are being told that oh you know we have a rock obama in the white house and you are paranoid and if you got shot in the back 20 times you were probably doing something and so on and on. I think maybe you cannot draw a Strai