Society officials cited two cases of “unacceptable racial intolerance” and added the remedy of Benga, a young man from the Mbuti of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was exposed for several days in September 1906. They noted that the outrage of black ministers “ended the shameful incident.”
Benga moved from the zoo to an orphanage in Brooklyn and then to Lynchburg, Virginia, where she worked in a tobacco factory. He died of suicide in 1916.
Conservation society officials also condemned the “pseudo-scientific racism on eugenics” promoted through two of its founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr.
Excerpts from Grant’s e-book “The Passage of the Great Career” were included in a defense exhibition for one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, the zoo said.
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“We deeply regret that many other people and generations have been harmed by these movements or because of our inability to condemn and publicly denounce them earlier,” officials said, which was first reported in the New York Times.
The conservation company’s leading executive, Cristion Samper, told The Times that the organization had begun researching its 125th anniversary story this year. Samper said the process, combined with conversations about the racial injustice sweeping the country after the police killing of George Floyd, had led to an apology.
The Associated Press contributed to the report.