Page "Human zoo" Paragraph 19

In 1906, socialite and amateur anthropologist Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, had Congolese pygmy Ota Benga put on display at the Bronx Zoo in New York City alongside apes and other animals.

At the behest of Grant, a prominent eugenicist, the zoo director William Hornaday placed Ota Benga displayed in a cage with the chimpanzees, then with an orangutan named Dohong, and a parrot, and labeled him The Missing Link, suggesting that in evolutionary terms Africans like Ota Benga were closer to apes than were Europeans.

It triggered protests from the city's clergymen, but the public reportedly flocked to see it.