In 1906, Ota Benga—a young man from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo—was exhibited at the Bronx Zoo alongside primates. It sounds impossible. It isn't.
We trace his story from the atrocities of the Congo Free State and the rubber boom to the rise of pseudoscience and one of America's most shameful public spectacles. It's a short episode, but it's one that stuck with me.
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