Stillman & a "Human Zoo"

A group of Philippine “Head-Hunters” on display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. (Jessie Tarbox Beals/Missouri Historical Society)

 

     From an article in the www.timeline.com website about two African men delivered in 1901 to Stillman College (then called Stillman Institute) in Tuscaloosa by human traffickers, some of whom intended the people they "collected" to be put in "human zoos" as entertainment:

"...once they reached the U.S. (Presbyterian Minister Samuel Phillips) Verner’s primary goal appeared to be to make a buck off them. After unsuccessfully attempting to “rent” them to the Smithsonian Institution along with the other “pieces” of his collection, Verner eventually deposited Kassongo and Kondola in 1901 at the Stillman Institute, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,* which at the time operated a middle school and high school. Just a year later, Kassongo was killed in a stampede that broke out after a fight during a Booker T. Washington speech in Birmingham, Alabama.

Word of the spoils Verner brought from Congo got around, and in 1903 he was hired to “acquire” 12 “pygmies” (among them an adult woman, two infants, a patriarch, and a priest or healer), four “Red Africans,” including one “fine type,” and two other natives of a “distinct ethnic type” for display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

 

(*I could not find any reference to the two men at Stillman on the school webpage)