Grant and others founded the conservation movement in America. Like other men of his social set- Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Fairfield Osborn, a president of the American Museum of Natural History, to name two-Grant adored nature, which to his milieu meant the North American continent, minus its original native population and reconstituted as a hunting preserve and contemplative retreat for themselves. Madison Grant was someone who preferred to stay in the background and pull strings but because of history, both past and present, he is not in the background anymore. Eventually, Ota Benga was moved to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, in Brooklyn, and he ended up in Virginia, where he shot himself. He later said that it was important for the zoo not to give even the appearance of having yielded to the ministers’ demand. The mayor’s office referred them to Grant, who put them off. A group of black Baptist ministers went to the mayor and demanded that the travesty be stopped. A traveller had brought him to New York and to the zoo, where huge crowds came to stare and jeer. Ota Benga belonged to a tribe of Pygmies whom the Belgians had slaughtered in the Congo. Grant favored a certain type of white man over all other kinds of humans, on a graded scale of disapproval, and he reserved his vilest ill wishes and contempt for blacks.Īs Du Bois would have remembered, in 1906 the zoo put an African man named Ota Benga on display in the primate cages. As much as anyone on the planet, Grant was Du Bois’s natural enemy.
Though he and Du Bois lived and worked within a few miles of each other for decades, I don’t know if the two ever met. In 1912, it was called the New York Zoological Park, and it was run by a patrician named Madison Grant from an old New York family. Even unmemorialized, 3059 Villa is a not-unpleasant spot from which to contemplate the great man’s life.Ībout a forty-minute walk away is the Bronx Zoo. A fire hydrant drips, slowly enlarging a hole in the sidewalk. Maple and locust trees shade the front stoops, and residents wait at eight-twenty on Tuesday mornings to move their cars for the street-sweeping truck. The first time I went to Du Bois’s old address, I wondered if I might find a plaque, but the house is gone, and 3059 Villa is now part of a fenced-in parking lot. You hear Spanish and Chinese and maybe Hausa spoken on the street. The anchor business at that intersection seems to be the Osvaldo #5 Barber Shop, which flies pennants advertising services for sending money to Africa and to Bangladesh. It’s just off Jerome Avenue, not far from the Bedford Park subway station. When I’m walking in that borough I sometimes stop by the site. He moved to a small rented house there with his wife, Nina Gomer Du Bois, and their daughter, Yolande, in about 1912. Du Bois, the twentieth century’s leading black intellectual, once lived at 3059 Villa Avenue, in the Bronx.
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