Shocking Story: Learn how an African man was used as a human zoo spectacle

Call in to learn how Black Lives have been "caged" for entertainment since the turn of the century.  Bars by any name...are a prison...and a cage. Join host Dr. Sonia Banks, Chair, Manhattan Chapter, NCBW for our Leadersatplay Education Series. Meet an award-winning journalist, Pamela Newkirk, as she reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid.  In 1904, Ota Benga, a young Congolese “pygmy”—a person of petite stature—arrived from central Africa and was featured in an anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Two years later, the New York Zoological Gardens displayed him in its Monkey House, caging the slight 103-pound, 4-foot 11-inch tall man with an orangutan.