The placing of the boy in the cage with a monkey is an outrage the Negro race in America has a hard enough time as it is and Getting away from the prejudice that is closely related to the monkey without having a member of the race placed on exhibition leading men of science from Harvard and Princeton and Columbia University was saying that Africans were midway between an orangutan and a human being so a hundred years later It should not come as much of a surprise that many people still claim to these notions of European superiority African inferiority The year was 1859 Three months after Charles Darwin published his book on the origin of species American promoter PT Barnum unveiled a new attraction at his popular Museum in New York City It featured what was described as the what is it or man monkey? Visitors were told that the creature had been captured by hunters in Africa who discovered a race of beings Roving among the trees and branches like Eames and monkeys Museum staff declared that the creature had been pronounced by scientists as a connecting link between African blacks and lower animals In reality Barnum's so-called man monkey was an African American man named William Henry Johnson Thanks to Barnum Johnson spent much of his life on public display as an evolutionary missing link sometimes in a cage Many reporters at the time were happy to promote the deception The New York Tribune declared that Barnum's performer seemed to be a cross between an ape species and a negro While another paper declared the head is shaped like that of a monkey But the face is more like that of an African Negro of the lower order It has been pronounced by naturalist as a specimen of the connecting link between man and monkey Many more supposed missing links were marketed to the public at freak shows throughout America in the 1880s There was crowd Promoted as living proof of Darwin's theory of the descent of man She was described as a perfect specimen of the steppe between man and monkey actually Crowd was a young woman from Southeast Asia Who suffered from hypertrichosis a rare genetic condition that produces excessive hair? In the early 1900's there was Congo the ape man usually exhibited in a cage next to a chimpanzee Most of these early presentations of missing links were crude hoaxes put forward by hucksters not scientists But the quest to dramatize the lower stages of human evolution eventually reached far beyond freak shows It ultimately involved the most elite members of the scientific community and it was given a platform at one of the most celebrated events in early twentieth-century America Today Forrest Parkinson Lewis is a place for walking or riding a bicycle or spending a quiet Sunday afternoon, but More than a century ago. It was one of the most visited locations in the entire United States the site of the 1904 st. Louis World's Fair Attracting more than 19 million visitors. The World's Fair was known for its lavish neoclassical buildings Its 22 story high ferris wheel and the public debut of innovations such as the x-ray machine and the ice cream cone But the fair had a darker side Organizers imported thousands of indigenous peoples from around the world to be put on public display In what was essentially a giant human Zoo? Unlike freak shows. The human Zoo in San Luis was created with the cooperation of America's scientific establishment the man behind the human zoo was anthropologist William McGee One of the nation's leading scientists McGee had already served as acting president of the American Association for the Advancement of science In 1903. He was asked to head the anthropology department for the World's Fair McGee had grand plans are presenting the story of human evolution by displaying representatives of what he considered lower stages of the human race McGee's plans reflected the ideas of mainstream anthropology of the time Anthropology was kind of founded on this idea of mapping Civilization from the highest to the lowest Right with the lowest at that time said to be Africans and then you sort of move up leading men of science from Harvard and Princeton and Columbia University was saying that Africans were midway between an orangutan and a human being like many scientists of his day mcgee drew inspiration for his ideas on human development from Darwin's theory that humans had evolved from ape-like ancestors the wins theory provided a template for categorizing Africans as biological inference His impact created a bandwagon effect on many scholars on both sides of the Atlantic Africans were demeaned with terms like savages and contract animals admittedly some of these comparisons were used before Darwin What after Darwin the increasingly took on the authority of science? Darwin argued that the break in evolutionary history between Ames and men came between Africans and Australian Aborigines and gorillas In other words, he thought blacks were the closest humans to Apes German scientist Ernst Haeckel helped popularize the idea Heron steckel was the leading German Darwinist in the late 19th and early 20th century. He corresponded extensively with Darwin and Darwin recognized heckles affinity with his own theory Ernst Haeckel also is known for his raving racism and in fact, he had a graphic of the history of human evolution that in very pointed terms really embedded a racist view of Human evolution you had the Teutonic male on the top Those are the Germanic male and then at the bottom you had some creatures that look partly like Apes partly like Jews He was also anti-semitic and in the middle you have the transition from the ape-like creatures to the first human creatures the ape-like creatures look pretty much like they're Africans and The takeaway point that Ernst Haeckel had from this graph. Was that the difference between the highest human being and the lowest human being the gap between the highest Teutonic male and the first human being that was just one step above the a Was larger than the gap between the lowest human being and the highest aim At the st Louis World's Fair William McGee expressed a similar view Arguing that scientists have now shown The structure of the lowest humans more nearly resembles that of the highest ape-like animals than that of the highest humans Like other scientists of the era McGee saw primitive non-white peoples as living evidence of man's evolutionary history the savage stands strikingly close to subhuman species in every aspect of mentality as well as in bodily habits and bodily structure McGee was determined to use primitive people's at the fair to dramatize for the public the different stages of human Evolution beginning with races. He considered lowest on the evolutionary scale McGee arranged for native peoples to be put on display in villages designed to recreate their native habitats These villages were enclosed by fences making them truly seem like human zoos More than 4 million fair goers reportedly visited these anthropological displays Eagerly staring at and poking at the indigenous peoples in their enclosures Adding to the indignities Native peoples were pressured to participate in a series of athletic contests designed to show they were biologically inferior to whites Those on display were also subjected to experiments in a special laboratory set up by the fair's anthropology department directed by a psychology professor from Columbia University The lab conducted tests to measure native people's intelligence and physical features and even their threshold for pain Some scientists came to the fair with more gruesome plans Alesh heard littke was an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. He came to San Luis hunting for dead bodies Her liquor was obsessed with analyzing the brains of other races to gain insight into human evolution He went on to assemble a collection of hundreds of embalm demon brains many of them still stored by the Smithsonian Her littke extracted a promise from doctors in st Louis to hand over the brains of any of the natives who might die while on display at the fair Native peoples were brought to the st. Louis exposition from the far corners of the globe From Japan came representatives of the Ainu people Patagonian z' came from south america eager odds and Negritos came from the philippines Both were thought by scientists of the time to be near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder for humans The Negritos were even marketed at the fair as another missing link between humans and apes But perhaps the most exotic people group brought us and Lewis for public display were pygmies from the African Congo We'll the pygmies brought last week to the World's Fair prove Darwin's theory of the missing link will a study of the little black children of the African jungles shed light on the theory evolved by Darwin as regards the evolution of the human race Dr. WJ McGee chief of the anthropology department of the World's Fair is convinced that it will This is the first time that the Aboriginal people of Africa have been brought to an english-speaking country This is the first opportunity that has been presented to scientists to study them Many characteristics were noticed in the pygmies that closely resembled the ape or the simian type It is believed that the pygmies who are said to represent the lowest form of human development Our next remove from the simian family The pygmies appearing at the st Louis World's Fair had been transported from Africa by former missionary turned explorer Samuel Phillips Verna Verna had gone to Africa with the explicit goal of finding pygmies to display at the fair Who had gone to the Congo heavily armed and he had gone hunting? For these people who call pygmies these diminutive people of the Central African forest the fairs Anthropologist William Magee repeatedly compared the pygmies to monkeys and apes in the journal Science He even asserted that pygmies were commonly considered to approach Subhuman types more closely than any other variety of the genus Homo They look instead of by men of science at that time to be the lowest form of preeminence Or in some thought they will supplement the pygmies were less than thrilled by their welcome at the fair The Americans treat us as they do our pet monkey They laugh at us and poke their umbrellas into our faces They do the same to our monkey One pygmy at the fair became a special celebrity His name was OTA Benga Samuel Verner had purchased him at a slave market OTA Benga was advertised to fair goers as the only genuine African cannibal in America today For a nickel he would display his pointed teeth that supposedly enabled him to eat human flesh At the end of the fair the pygmies returned to Africa with Samuel Verner But in 1906 Verner brought out a beggar back to America it would prove a fateful choice Samuel Verner returned from Africa to New York City on July the 30th 1906 arriving on the SS Armenia from Liverpool he was accompanied by two chimpanzees a snake a parrot and 50 boxes of materials from Africa that he hoped to sell to museums He was also joined by OTA Benga Verna quickly departed New York leaving Benga at the American Museum of Natural History and Manhattan Established in 1869. The museum was already becoming one of the premier scientific institutions in the world Oh Topanga was largely left free to wander the museum's exhibit halls When Samuel Verner eventually returned to New York, he was fighting off creditors and the Museum wanted him to find new lodgings for OTA Benga so verna worked out an agreement to move Oh Topanga to the New York Zoological Park Otherwise known as the Bronx Zoo spread over more than 260 acres the Bronx Zoo had been envisioned by its founders as the largest zoo in the world and the grandest zoological establishment on earth the zoo was directed by William temple Hornaday a Noted zoologist Hornaday formerly worked at the Smithsonian and he had already founded the National Zoo in Washington, DC Overseeing holiday was an executive committee chaired by Henry Fairfield Osborn a distinguished professor at Columbia University Holiday and Osborn had dreams of exhibiting more than just animals at their new zoo Both wanted to install Native Americans on zoo grounds With Osborn promising that one day the Indian and his tepee would take their place next to the zoological parks Buffalo Now they had their chance to put their first human on display Hornaday quickly agreed to purchase one of Vernors chimpanzees and to house both the chimp and Otto Benga at the zoo Holliday planned to exhibit the pygmy and the chimpanzee together in a cage in the zoo's monkey house It was presented as science not as a circus act because these were men of science who were doing this Oh Topanga went on display in the monkey house on Saturday September the 8th 1906 The next day the sign was placed on the cage explaining the new exhibit the African pygmy alter Binga aged 23 years hiked 4 feet 11 inches Wait a hundred and three pounds brought from the Kasai River Congo Free State Exhibited each afternoon during September Thousands of New Yorkers came to stare and laugh and debate the meaning of the display. Is it a man some of them wondered? Newspaper coverage brought even more people and in just a few weeks the zoo drew nearly a quarter million visitors but the notoriety also brought controversy New York's clergy in particular were horrified at what they saw as a dehumanizing spectacle First to speak out was the Reverend Robert Stewart MacArthur pastor of the city's Calvary Baptist Church One of the largest baptist congregations in America the person responsible for this exhibition Degrades himself as much as he does the African Instead of making a beast of this little fellow he should be put in school ministers from New York's african-american community soon organized a protest committee after Visiting the zoo and seeing Bangor for themselves. They were horrified. They thought it was outrageous They clearly saw a human being who appeared to be afraid who was being heckled and hear that and things flown at him and he was being you know - based and on the hallowed grounds of the New York Zoological Society in New York City The ministers demanded that OTA Benga be taken off display and be offered an education James H Gordon Superintendent of the Howard colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn appealed to the zoo to end the spectacle We would have seen that he was well cared for Gordon also denounced the way the young African was being used as a prop to prove Darwinian evolution Such an exhibition only degrades a human being We do not like this exhibition of one of our race with the monkeys Depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the eight Samuel Verner tried to deflect the criticism denying that he put oh Tobago on display to show that he was somehow Subhuman, if vota Binga is in a cage He is only there to look after the animals Zoo director holiday meanwhile declared that the black ministers protest was ridiculous Though a believer myself in the Darwinian theory. I had no idea of using the exhibition to enforce it The boy is on exhibition simply because the public wishes to see him he is well treated and happy To say that the boy is placed in the cage to show his similarities to the monkeys nonsense He is much more intelligent than many white men who I have known Whole today made clear that he wasn't about to shut down the popular exhibit the exhibition shall certainly be continued unless the directors of the park decide otherwise But the leaders of the New York Zoological Society were pleased by the display Henry Fairfield Osborn even congratulated Hornaday for the excellent press coverage commenting that Benga is certainly making his way Successfully as a sensation spurned by Hornaday the african-american ministers decided to appeal to George McClellan Junior Democratic mayor of New York McClellan was the son of the controversial general during the Civil War who had tried to unseat Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864 the elder McClellan openly confessed that he was prejudiced in favor of the white race and Said that he couldn't learn to like the odor of either Billy Goats or Negroes The younger McClellan now refused to even meet with the african-american ministers Sending out an assistant with a dismissive note referring them to the New York Zoological Society The ministers then went to see Madison grant the Zoological Society's secretary Grant was a prominent member of New York society a graduate of Yale. He received a law degree from Columbia he was also a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History a counselor of the American Geographical Society and a founder of the Bronx Zoo It would have been hard for the ministers to find someone less sympathetic Grant was an open racist who thought blacks were an inferior race and regarded those who had parents of different races as mongrels within a decade, he would write the passing of the great race a book which championed Nordic supremacy and keeping black subservient to whites The book was reportedly praised by Adolf Hitler as his Bible grant also rebuffed the ministers So did the city's most prominent newspaper the New York Times? Which profess to be puzzled by the anger of the protesters? We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter Describing African pygmies as very low in the human scale The Times made clear that it viewed pygmies as less than fully human Whether they are really closer to the anthropoid Apes than the other African savages or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes They are of equal interest to the student of ethnology and can be studied with profit The editors at The Times thought it absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation OTA Benga was suffering in Fact they claimed the pygmy was probably enjoying himself The suggestion that Benga should be placed in a school instead of a cage Ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him and one from which he could draw no advantage Whatever the idea that men are all much alike Except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date After African American ministers criticized the zoo for trying to use OTA Benga to prove Darwinian evolution the New York Times weighed in again The Reverend colored brother should be told that Evolution in one form or another is now taught in the textbooks of all the schools And that it is no more debatable than the multiplication table as protests continued Increasingly rowdy crowds came to the zoo in order to visit the pygmy on Sunday, September 16th 40,000 people converged on zoo grounds to see the city's newest sensation According to press reports the mobs chased OTA Benga around the zoo all day howling cheering and yelling Some of them poked him in the ribs others tripped him all laughed at him Venga responded by shooting an arrow at his tormentors after which zookeepers caught him and returned him to his cage As both crowds and OTA Benga became unruly zoo director Hornaday grew increasingly defensive He now claimed that he had decided to exhibit OTA Benga in a cage simply for convenience We have no platform that we could place him on and this big Open-air cage was the best place we could find to put him where everybody could see him Eventually the continued controversy made Hornaday want to wash his hands of the whole affair ultimately an agreement was reached to move OTA Benga to the Howard colored Orphan Asylum and later to a seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia There nearly 10 years later OTA Benga shot himself to death Venga had expressed a desire to return to his native Africa But by 1916 the continent was being further ravaged by European powers as they fought World War one So return was no longer an option. I think the hopelessness of it all the trauma he had sustained the loneliness and You know, I can't even imagine He had no idea what had become of his his people if his village was still even there So it's not hard to imagine the myriad reasons why he would have sunk into this deep depression that ultimately Caused him to take his life in one final indignity the New York Times published Anna bitchery Assuring readers that during OTA Benga stay in their city He was actually an employee of the Bronx Zoo who had been hired to feed the Apes according to The Times it was this employment that gave rise to the Unfounded report that OTA Benga was being held in the park as one of the exhibits in the monkey cage OTA Benga was largely forgotten by history until the 1990s but the passion of social Darwinists in America for putting humans on display continued and 15 years later Some of the same figures involved in the OTA Benga scandal would be involved in another kind of human display one whose impact would prove even more horrifying In September of 1921 leading scientists from around the globe gathered the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for the second International Congress of eugenics Eugenics was the science of breeding better people The term had been coined by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton But Darwin himself helped lay the groundwork for eugenics in his book The Descent of Man According to Darwin human beings developed through a long and cruel process of natural selection or survival of the fittest Less fit organisms died leaving more capable organisms to reproduce and flourish It was this ruthless process of elimination. Not the foresight of a designer That had propelled human beings to the top of the evolutionary ladder But Darwin worried that modern society was now doing its best to undermine natural selection We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination We build asylums for the imbecile the maimed in the sick we Institute poor laws and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of Everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak Constitution Would formerly have succumbed to smallpox No, one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals would doubt that. This must be highly interest to the race of man hardly, anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed a kindly, man Darwin was troubled by the implications of his theory for society But his followers had a solution They thought they could apply Darwinian selection Rationally and humanely through the science of eugenics which became known as the self-direction of human evolution Eugenics was eagerly embraced by America's scientific elites Sometimes today it's argued that eugenics was just fringe science just a few people believed in it Of course, we don't believe in it. Now that ignores the fact that for decades Eugenics was what could be called the consensus view of the scientific community the eugenics Congress at the American Museum of Natural History drew scientists from America's top research institutions Including Harvard Yale MIT this Sounion, ohio state UC Berkeley and the University of Texas participants included inventor Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Darwin's own son Leonard who lashed out at the threat biological defectives posed to modern society Scientists were welcomed to the eugenics congress by then President of the American Museum of Natural History Henry Fairfield Osborn who had been involved in the display of OTA Benga at the Bronx Zoo a future head of the American Association for the Advancement of science Osborn had become one of the most celebrated scientific champions of evolution in America Soon he would become embroiled in a controversy with politician William Jennings Bryan over a fossilized tooth discovered in Nebraska Osborn insisted that the tooth supplied irrefutable evidence of the existence of man-like Apes in ancient North America To his embarrassment the tooth later turned out to be part of an extinct pig At the eugenics Congress Osborn told scientists that eugenics was essential to the future of human evolution To know the worst as well as the best in heredity to preserve and to select the best These are the most essential forces in the future evolution of human society Osborn also attacked racial intermarriage 500,000 years of human evolution have impressed certain distinctive virtues as well as faults on each race Put three races together You are likely to unite the vices of all three as the virtues Osborn argued that racial groups should be studied to determine what tasks each race is best fitted to accomplish But it was clear that he already thought he knew the proper place of non-whites If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturalists or a fine mechanic the American Museum of Natural History Accompanied the eugenics Congress with a major Museum exhibition designed to sell eugenics to the American public Participants included America's top publishers insurance companies government agencies and private groups like the American Red Cross as Many as 10,000 people attended the special exhibition There were no live humans put on display at the eugenics exhibit But it was still a kind of human zoo. It put human racial groups under the microscope to judge their worth to society There were displays highlighting differences between black and white babies in the womb Displays comparing the mental stamina of different races displays reporting on the capabilities of immigrants and Displays showcasing equipment for measuring human intelligence and other features There also would displace about the human brain one compared the brains of criminals and non criminals But the most extensive brain display was created by anthropologist alesh heard literature from his growing collection of embalmed brains Heard littke left his original specimens stored in jars of the Smithsonian But he brought gelatin models of the embalmed brains of AIDS and three races of humans Heard Lydia's presentation filled seven separate display cases It also included a series of skulls from Native Americans The scows purported to show that Native American brains revealed primitive features from earlier stages of evolution in the midst of more sophisticated Displays were cruda exhibits featuring the blatantly racist books of Madison grant and Lathrop Stoddart Stoddard had published the rising tide of color against white world supremacy Stoddard claimed that whites were in danger of being overrun by the colored races of the world and He argued that immigration from what he called lower human types had to be rigorously curtailed You Genest pretty universally viewed immigrants and people of non-white races as a drag on the human race you Janice viewed blacks and Mexicans and Hispanics as throwbacks evolutionary throw backs that were lower races in evolutionary terms and therefore were a drain on modern society and They justified this in the name of Darwinian science, you know, there were racists before the you genis The interesting thing about eugenics was the way that they built on top of Darwinian biology and claimed that there was a scientific justification For racism the eugenics exhibition advocated a chilling agenda for public policy Including forced sterilization and harsh new restrictions on immigration It also promoted a radical proposal Advanced by the eugenics Record Office one of the eugenics groups participating in the exhibition The proposal called for assembling biological profiles on all Americans to determine whether they were biologically fit to mate The eugenics records office was so extreme. They wanted to hold records on everyone in the United States biological records showing their family trees So that if you want to marry someone you could write to them and they could tell you whether the person you were willing to Marry had a fit family tree in evolutionary terms so that you can marry them or if they had bad heredity So that you couldn't and in fact They had exercises and packets that were given to biology teachers around Country that one of the exercises you were supposed to do in your biology class when you're studying Evolution and then eugenics was to have kids fill out this form with their family tree of You know who are the black sheeps of the family what diseases they had in the family so that these could then be sent off To the eugenics Record Office and their vaults and so that they could keep records on everyone the American Museum of Natural History later called the eugenics Congress of 1921 perhaps the most important scientific meeting ever held in the museum a Decade later the museum was at it again hosting the Third International Congress of eugenics in 1932 This time it put on an even more extensive museum exhibition for the public At the entrance to the exhibit hall were placed the busts of two men accredited as the founding fathers of eugenics Francis Galton and Charles Darwin Although some scientists raised concerns about eugenics Probably the strongest opposition to the movement came from traditional religion. It's a story that Americans don't know as well as they should and it's a story that American Christians don't know as well as they should but at the Basis of opposition to the so-called scientific eugenicist movement in the early 20th century where Christians Protestants Baptists Catholics who understood the value of Every human being that's not only a Christian value that is fundamental to the American experiment itself When Nebraska's Legislature passed a forced sterilization bill in 1913 Governor John Morehead a Presbyterian vetoed it Morehead argued that the legislation not only violated the state's Bill of Rights. It also offended a higher law This proposed legislation seems more in keeping with the pagan age than with the teachings of Christianity Man is more than an animal while many modernist clergy supported eugenics theologically conservative religious figures were much more skeptical American evangelical William Jennings Bryan for example denounced eugenics as an impossible system for scientific breeding Under which a few supposedly superior intellects self-appointed would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind But the most consistent opposition to eugenics came from Roman Catholics in 1930 pope pius xi strongly condemned forced sterilization for eugenics in one of his encyclical x' The pope criticized you Genest s-- for asking the government to assume a power which it can never legitimate ly possess The most fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching is the intrinsic dignity of every human being in other words People are valuable simply as creatures made in the image and likeness of God They're not valuable merely because they have economic value or they're productive or they're smart They have value in and of themselves as spiritual creatures made in God's image that idea obviously contradicts the fundamental principle of eugenics which is Through either passive or active means to favor particular ethnic groups over others Across America Catholic clergy actively resisted the eugenics crusade in Louisiana the Catholic Church played a key role in preventing the passage of a sterilization law Catholic opposition to eugenics was so pronounced that some eugenics groups targeted the catholic church for attacks The human betterment foundation in california was dedicated to promoting eugenics through forced sterilization Its president. Yes Ghazni lashed out at catholic efforts to block sterilization laws Every legislature considering a sterilization bill in the United States is visited by representatives of the bishop or Archbishop Who lay down the law of Rome to those willing to accept the henchmen are prompt to fall in line? Ghazni suggested that the Catholic Church should be asked to pay for Catholics who aren't sterilized if Catholics do not want their Feeble-minded communicant sterilized it would seem more logical to ask them as Hitler's done in Germany to keep these Feeble-minded segregated at their own expense in order that the American Commonwealth may be subjected to no unnecessary Damage from the presence of a great body of defectives who increased the amount of human misery contribute largely to the ranks of the delinquent and criminal augment the tax burdens diminished the efficiency of Industry and Dilute the quality of American citizenship The eugenics movement in the supportive eugenics in the early 20th century Actually tried to make an anti-catholic campaign part of their public argument on the one hand They claimed that their ideas were based firmly in natural science And yet they actually ran a public campaign that was anti religious. You get the impression that there was something more than simple empirical science at stake in the debate Despite opposition from Catholics and others the American eugenics movement continued to flourish in the years leading up to World War two The eugenics movement eventually led to the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 people in America compulsory sterilization in the name of eugenics was ultimately upheld by the United States Supreme Court in a decision that declared Three generations of imbeciles are enough Many of those sterilized would not be considered mentally handicapped today The eugenics movement also succeeded in securing the passage of a draconian Immigration law that sharply restricted the flow of non Nordic ethnic groups into the United States While considering the legislation the United States Congress invited testimony by a leading u Genest on the biological aspects of immigration Starting in the 1920s in particular there was a huge push for immigration restrictions on people who are coming from non Germanic non northern European countries, and so people coming from Mexico to the United States or people coming from Africa or southern European countries that had people that the U Janice viewed as Evolutionarily backwards. They had to be stopped because they were going to destroy our Society but the most horrifying implementation of eugenics policies took place not in America but in Nazi Germany the Nazis ultimately sterilized more than three hundred thousand supposed hereditary defectives in the name of eugenics They then started gassing the disabled at special medical facilities It was in these killing centers that the Nazis began to perfect the methods. They would later use to exterminate Jews The sordid history of eugenics and the mainstream scientific communities embrace of it remains completely unknown to many Americans So does the scientific community's involvement with social Darwinism and scientific racism? including human zoos It's a history, some people are still trying to cover up Geneticist James Watson won the Nobel Prize for Co discovering the structure of DNA But in 2007, he sparked outrage when he suggested that African blacks were genetically inferior to European whites Echoing the arguments of scientific racist from the past Watson claimed that black inferiority was due to evolution There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of people's Geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically James Watson Watson was widely condemned for his comments both inside and outside of the scientific community It was an indication of how times have changed But although scientific racism no longer received support from mainstream science Many in the scientific community remain reluctant to honestly discuss the past Sheeran Western brew is mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2001 She was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives when she proposed a resolution to encourage teaching students about the history of scientific racism The resolution highlighted Darwin's views on race as well as how his views had been Exploited by other scientists such as Ernst Haeckel to promote racism The resolution also encouraged teaching students more recent scientific findings supporting racial equality I'm not asking you to take evolution out of the school I am merely asking the legislature the State Department of Education the Board of Regents and the State University System that they'd be made aware that Darwin promoted the Justification of racism and his definitive work on the Origin of Species by means of natural selection and the son of man I certainly understand that racism was in effect before Darwin this has never been denied Yet he was the originator of a scientific justification for racism as well as giving wings to modern racism Harvard University Stephen Jay Gould wrote quotes biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859 but they increased by orders of magnitude following Brooms resolution provoked a firestorm with supporters of Darwin's theory accusing her of trying to unfairly maligned Charles Darwin this resolutions not only a product of creationists but also a Christian supremacists and Christians permit ISM is a high paced ideology and you can't combat hatred with hatred. I never ever have emulated any type of hate Toward anyone The resolution only passed after all references to Darwin and hackle were deleted It was as if scientific racism had never happened But Louisiana isn't the only state where the past misuse of science has been censored In 2007 the Kansas State Board of Education rewrote a statewide curriculum standard about the history of science The standard originally called for students to understand both the positive and negative aspects of science on society including how science can be abused as Examples of the abuse of science the original standard cited the eugenics movement Scientific racism and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment where government researchers left poor black men Untreated for syphilis in order to observe the progression of the disease The Kansas Board of Education revise the curriculum standard to eliminate any study of the abuses of science Now students would only learn about how science had improved Society The original standard did not mention Darwin or darwin's theory That did not stop proponents of rewriting the standard from claiming. They were defending the teaching of evolution But public officials aren't the only ones who have tried to cover up the history of scientific racism Some of the institution's most involved in promoting scientific racism in the past are still suppressing their own history the American Museum of Natural History remains one of the world's leading science museums But to this day it has never apologized for the role it played in promoting the international eugenics movement It has also tried to downplay the role of scientists in promoting scientific racism In 2005 the museum mounted a major new exhibition on the life and legacy of Charles Darwin The exhibition is still available today as a traveling exhibit the exhibit contains a section on social Darwinism that fails to acknowledge any involvement by the scientific community in either eugenics or scientific racism even More glaringly the exhibit also fails to disclose the museum's own role in promoting social Darwinist policies like eugenics according to the current exhibit Social Darwinism had no real connection with either Darwin or science The fact of the matter is that if you read the scientists of the day in the late 19th and early 20th century many of them were Promoting racism and even racial extermination extinction of races. They were promoting the gaining of living space they were promoting competition the things that we know of as social Darwinism these were things being promoted by Charles Darwin himself to some degree many other leading biologists errant Steckle in Germany and many You could go on and on it by the 1920s and 30s They were becoming rallied very prominent. If you look in especially the field of anthropology and evolutionary anthropology Many of them were promoting social Darwinist. This was not just an idea of some cranks Or some political people that didn't really understand the science. This was an idea. That was very prominent in scientific circles Officials of the American Museum of Natural History declined a request to be interviewed for this documentary Their stated reason was that filmmakers were unable to purchase two million dollars in insurance The museum also turned down repeated requests to answer questions about its history and writing Officials at the Bronx Zoo are likewise skittish when it comes to discussing its display of OTA Benga They also refused to be interviewed and if you visit the zoo today, you won't find any remembrance of what happened to odor bingo Instead what they've done is they've closed off the monkey house. So we wrote abanda was housed at you The public could not even see it now and they have just not had any comment whatsoever It's as if zoo officials hope that OTA Benga and the scientific racism that dehumanized him whilst a forgotten others seemed to share the same hope But some things should never be forgotten because things that are forgotten have a way of coming back The recent resurgence of white supremacist groups in America has raised chilling echoes of the past Evolutionary arguments for racism that were rejected by the scientific community are now being resurrected by modern racists in 2009 white supremacist James von Braun drove to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC Where he fatally shot an African American security guard Von, Braun had published a manifesto arguing that crossbreeding whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the white gene pool while increasing the number of mongrels Richard Spencer is a leader of the so called alt-right. He argues that quote Darwinism offers a compelling and rational justification for whites to act on behalf of their ancestors and progeny and Feel a shared sense of destiny with their extended kin group unquote in a 2017 study more than 400 self-identified members of the old right revealed that they view blacks Mexicans and other racial and ethnic groups as less evolved and Closer to humans ape-like ancestors than whites The misuse of science to promote racism is no longer just a sad relic of our history It's also an uncomfortable part of our present One reason we should remember the sins of the past is to help us avoid making the same mistakes again We need to learn from the past not cover it up You