On a September afternoon in 1906, visitors to the Bronx Zoo found a new exhibit in the Monkey House. Inside an iron cage sat a small African man, four feet eleven inches tall, with sharpened teeth. A sign identified him as Ota Benga, age twenty-three, weight 103 pounds, brought from the Kasai River in the Congo Free State by Dr. Samuel P.
Verner. He was exhibited each afternoon during September. The cage sat beside a larger enclosure housing the zoo’s orangutans, and the implication was deliberate: here was a supposed missing link between primates and man. Benga was a member of the Mbuti people, a short-statured ethnic group native to the forests near the Kasai River in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
He was born around 1883. His early life was marked by terrible violence. During the brutal rule of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Congo Free State operated as a personal fiefdom, with forced labor generating vast profits from rubber and ivory. Those who failed to meet production quotas were often mutilated or killed.
Benga had married young and had children, but Belgian forces attacked his village in the early 1900s, killing his wife and children. He survived only because he was away on a hunting expedition. In 1903, the American businessman and explorer Samuel Phillips Verner arrived in the Congo. He had been paid eight thousand five hundred dollars to acquire indigenous people for the 1904 World’s Fair in St.
Louis. According to Verner’s own account, he purchased Benga for a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth. Verner intended to present Benga as what contemporaries called a pygmy, regarded by many whites of the era as a near-human link in the evolutionary chain. Benga was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1904 alongside Native Americans, Filipinos, and other Africans.
Some newspapers expressed skepticism about the portrayal of Benga as an evolutionary missing link, but he was nevertheless displayed in a human menagerie. During the fair, Benga resisted his captors, and disturbances among the exhibited Africans became so serious that an Illinois Regiment had to be called in to restore order. Geronimo, the Apache chief exhibited nearby, gave Benga an arrowhead as a sign of respect. After the fair, Verner returned Benga to Africa.
Benga tried to readjust, remarried, and lost his second wife to a snakebite. Unable to settle, he chose to go back to America with Verner. For a time he found lodging and work at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, but a dispute arose over his salary. The director of the New York Zoological Society, William Hornaday, offered Benga a job caring for African animals at the Bronx Zoo.
Hornaday soon noticed that visitors were more interested in Benga than in the animals, so he decided to put Benga on display. Benga was imprisoned in a cage and kept in a deliberately cool environment because the low temperatures agitated the primates and made the exhibit more lively. Newspaper articles described him glaring menacingly at visitors. Hornaday defended the exhibit, noting that similar human exhibitions had been held in Europe during the nineteenth century.
But the exhibit soon generated controversy. African-American clergymen and civic leaders in New York protested, and the criticism of Reverend James M. Gordon, a supervisor of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, carried particular weight. He convinced Mayor George B.
McClellan Jr. that Benga’s condition was inhumane. Later in 1906, Benga was removed from the exhibit. Although Benga wanted to return to Africa, he could not raise the funds or find a way to do so.
He spent the next several years moving between locations in the United States. After his release from the zoo, he was placed in the care of Reverend Gordon and lived for a time at the Brooklyn orphanage. In 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga to work at a tobacco plantation in Virginia. His sharpened teeth were capped to make him appear more ordinary, and he learned to speak English.
But his hope of returning home never faded. When World War I erupted in the summer of 1914, transatlantic shipping became perilous, and nonessential voyages were suspended. The prospect of returning to the Congo grew remote. On the twentieth of March 1916, at the age of about thirty-three, Benga built a ceremonial fire, removed the caps from his teeth, and shot himself in the chest.
He was buried in an unmarked grave in Lynchburg, Virginia. Another story of endurance centered on Lulu Hendley, a woman who rose from poverty and a life of petty crime to become one of the most famous madams in New Orleans. She was believed to have been born around 1868 in Selma, Alabama, though some historians argue she may have been born earlier, possibly during the Civil War. She migrated to New Orleans in the early 1880s, where she worked as a prostitute and amassed a considerable fortune.
In 1897, the municipal authorities of New Orleans passed an ordinance restricting prostitution to a designated district, which became known as Storyville. Hendley profited more than anyone from this legalized neighborhood. She built Mahogany Hall at 235 Basin Street at a cost of forty thousand dollars, a four-story brothel with fifteen private rooms, parlors, marble floors, a winding staircase, and an elevator. The establishment employed around forty women and catered to a wealthy clientele.
Hendley, known as the Diamond Queen of the Demimonde, often appeared as hostess wearing a red wig, a tiara, and diamond rings on every finger. Mahogany Hall also became one of the most noted jazz venues in New Orleans, hosting pioneers such as Jelly Roll Morton and Joe King Oliver, who later mentored Louis Armstrong. Hendley’s business interests extended beyond prostitution. In 1912 she opened the Lulu White Saloon on Bienville Street, and in 1906 she invested in the emerging film industry in Hollywood, though she was undercut by a business partner.
Her fortunes changed when the federal government closed Storyville during World War I. In 1917, the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, pressured the municipal government to repeal the 1897 law, fearing that prostitution was distracting troops bound for Europe. Mahogany Hall went into decline and was sold in 1929 for eleven thousand dollars, a fraction of its original cost. Following the imposition of Prohibition in 1920, Hendley turned her saloon into a soft-drink establishment and later became a bootlegger, producing rum and whiskey in illegal stills across Louisiana.
She was arrested repeatedly but never served a lengthy prison sentence. The circumstances of her death remain unclear. Some historians believe she died in 1931, while a bank teller later testified that she made a large withdrawal in 1941. Mahogany Hall was demolished in the 1940s, though the first floor of her saloon survives to this day.
Stephanie St. Clair, born on the island of Guadeloupe around 1897, became one of Harlem’s most formidable criminal figures. She arrived in New York City in the 1910s and eventually joined a century-old crime gang called the Forty Thieves. St.
Clair became deeply involved in the numbers business, an illegal lottery based on financial figures from Wall Street and New York’s banking system. African Americans, largely excluded from investing in the financial markets, used these policy banks as an alternative. By 1930, one journalist estimated that St. Clair had amassed a personal fortune of roughly half a million dollars.
She was known respectfully in Harlem as Madame St. Clair. Her success attracted the attention of Dutch Schultz, a violent and powerful gangster of the prohibition era. In the early 1930s Schultz pressured St.
Clair to surrender her business or pay him a share of her profits. She refused and organized opposition against him, encouraging Harlem residents to place their bets with her rather than with Schultz. Schultz responded with a campaign of intimidation that escalated into kidnappings and murders. At one point, St.
Clair hid under a heap of coal to escape his men. More than forty people were killed during the conflict. The feud ended not through her actions but through the unpredictable politics of New York’s underworld. In 1935, Schultz was shot and killed in a Newark restaurant on the orders of the mafia commission, which feared that his planned murder of the prosecutor Thomas Dewey would provoke a full-scale crackdown.
As Schultz lay dying, St. Clair reportedly sent him a telegram that read: “As your soul so shall you reap. ”
She also fought a long battle against law enforcement. In 1929 she was arrested and sentenced to eight months of hard labor.
Upon her release, she provided insider information to the Seabury Commission investigating corruption in New York’s police and courts, leading to the removal or dismissal of one police lieutenant and thirteen officers. In 1936 she entered a marriage contract with Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin, a controversial race activist, and when their relationship soured, she shot him on the nineteenth of January 1938. The bullet only grazed him, but St. Clair was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to two to ten years in prison.
After her release in the early 1940s, she retired quietly to a mansion on Long Island and lived on investments. She died in 1969 at the age of seventy-two, the newspapers carrying no notice of her death. The story of Sarah Forbes Bonetta began in West Africa. Born in 1843 as Aina, a high-ranking member of the Egba people, she was orphaned at the age of five when the kingdom of Dahomey raided her village.
She was taken to the court of King Ghezo, who gave her to Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the British Royal Navy ship HMS Bonetta as a gift in 1850. Forbes baptized her, giving her the name Sarah Forbes Bonetta, combining his surname with the name of his ship. She was brought to England and introduced to Queen Victoria, who was impressed by her intelligence and agreed to pay for her education.
After a period in Sierra Leone and England, Sarah married James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy African merchant, in 1862. The couple settled in Freetown and had three children. Queen Victoria served as godmother to their eldest daughter, Victoria. Sarah suffered from tuberculosis, and she moved to Madeira in the hope that the climate would ease her illness.
She died there on the fifteenth of August 1880, at around the age of thirty-seven. A granite obelisk was erected near her hometown in western Lagos in her memory, inscribed with her name. Henry Brown was born into slavery on a plantation in Louisa County, Virginia, in 1815 or 1816. As a young man, he married Nancy, who was owned by a man from an adjacent plantation.
Brown paid Nancy’s master fifty dollars a year to keep his family together. In August 1848, while Nancy was pregnant with their fourth child, her owner sold them all to a plantation in North Carolina. When Brown returned home from work, his family was gone. After mourning, he resolved to escape.
He conceived a plan to mail himself to freedom. With the help of a free African-American friend, James Smith, and a white shoemaker named Samuel Smith, Brown arranged to have himself shipped in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia. He paid over half of his savings, eighty-six dollars, for the operation. On the twenty-ninth of March 1849, he burned his finger with sulfuric acid to get time off work, then climbed into a box three feet long, two feet deep, and two feet seven inches wide.
The crate was lined with cloth and had three small holes for air. He carried only a small portion of water and a few biscuits. For twenty-seven hours he was transported by wagon, train, steamboat, ferry, and rail. At one point the box was placed upside down, and Brown later described his suffering: he felt his eyes swelling and the veins of his temples distended with the pressure of blood.
Two men who wanted a seat turned the box over and sat on it, relieving his agony. When the crate was opened in Philadelphia on the thirtieth of March 1849, Brown is said to have greeted the abolitionists who received him by saying, “How do you do, gentlemen,” before reciting a psalm from the Bible. Brown’s escape made him a celebrated figure in the abolitionist movement. He became a speaker for the anti-slavery society and published his autobiography, the Narrative of Henry Box Brown, in 1849.
He later performed with a moving panorama called Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery. When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it unsafe for him to remain in the United States, he sailed for England, where he continued his performances for ten years, eventually working as a magician under the name Professor H. Box Brown.
His last known performance took place in Brantford, Ontario, on the twenty-sixth of February 1889, and he is thought to have died in Toronto on the fifteenth of June 1897.