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Society officials cited two cases of “unacceptable racial intolerance,” adding the remedy of Benga, a young man from the Mbuti, other inhabitants of the present Democratic Republic of the Congo, which was on display 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.
Eugenics, a movement that sells selective human replicas of unwanted characteristics, had many followers in the early decades of the 20th century and played a vital role in the progression of Nazi policies.
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.