Departures of note

Samuel Phillips Verner, a former Presbyterian missionary in the Congo Free State, was hired by the St. Louis Exposition Company to procure African natives for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. In 1903, near the confluence of the Kasai and Sankuru rivers, he bought twelve people from slave traders, including Ota Benga, the sole survivor of a clan slaughtered by the Belgian Force Publique. Verner brought Benga to the United States, where he was displayed at the fair as a 'human spectacle' and later at the Bronx Zoo, where his treatment deteriorated until public outrage led New York Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. to order his release in late 1906.

Born in 1873 to a South Carolina slave-holding family, Verner graduated from the University of South Carolina in 1892 as the best of his class. After a mental breakdown and a year as a railroad laborer, he worked for his uncle at the Stillman Institute in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he taught and read the works of David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. In 1895, he was ordained under an extraordinary clause and sailed to the Congo, where he studied the Tshiluba language and survived a poisoned stake injury in 1897, though the account has been questioned. He resigned from missionary work in 1899.

In 1898, Verner brought three Congolese assistants to the United States, intending to teach them English and other skills before returning them; one, Kassongo, was killed in a stampede in 1902 at a Booker T. Washington speech in Birmingham. After the World's Fair, Verner struggled financially and sold his animals, artifacts, and the Africans he held as captives, including Benga, whom he sold to William T. Hornaday. Verner claimed Benga was free and that he did not profit from the zoo exhibition, but he faced criticism for his negligent concession. He later faded into obscurity, with a 1912 patent application listing his address in the Panama Canal area.

Verner was compared to David Livingstone and revered by some Christians for introducing Congo natives to Christian morality, but his legacy is overshadowed by the Ota Benga affair. Benga, unable to secure passage back to Africa, killed himself in 1916. Verner died on October 9, 1943, and was buried in Davidson River Cemetery, Transylvania County, North Carolina.