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Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) was the 31-year-old leading contributor to the sciences of aging and cancer, but she never knew it.

Born on Aug. 18, 1920, in Roanoke, Va., Lacks was a wife and mother of five who, on Feb. 1, 1951, went to Johns Hopkins Hospital because of a vaginal discharge; that day she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Treated in the hospital’s segregated ward for blacks, Lacks died on October 4, 1951, but she will live forever…
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Ota Benga (ca. 1881-1916) was a 23-year-old Congolese who was featured in a 1906 human zoo exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, which was intended to promote the theory that humans evolved from primates and scientific racism.

Ota Benga (or Bi, which means ‘friend’ in his language) was born around 1881 in what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the time, the area was under control of the Belgians, who plundered the land for ivory and rubber. Upon returning from gathering ivory one day, Ota Benga found that his village had been destroyed and his wife and two children murdered.

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Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (ca. 1788-1816) is not a name most are familiar with, but it is a name we all will remember after this.

As mentioned in the video, after Baartman’s death in 1816, George Cuvier dissected her genitalia and brains and made a plaster cast of her body which were then placed on public display at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) in Paris as late as 1974, under the name “Hottentot Venus“. Baartman was one of many other skeletons, whose remains were gathered by European scientists to prove the “inherent inferiority” of non-white individuals.

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Everyone is familiar with Rosa Parks. However, nine months before Parks became famous for refusing to obey a bus driver’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger, 15 year-old Claudette Colvin (1939-), was arrested for the same offense in Montgomery, AL.

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