Gorillas in the Mist and the Negro Migration North

As I listened to the most recent edition of NPR's SaturdayEdition,
I was regaled with misty water-colored memories of Bushman,
the legendary and allegedly beloved lowland gorilla who lived and
died at the Lincoln Park Zoo. I have long been fascinated by white
people's fascination with massive gorillas in cages and how neatly
this attraction dovetails with the growing migration of poor blacks
from the rural south to the industrialized north.

It is said 120,000 people flocked to the Lincoln Park Zoo on

a single June day in 1950 to see Bushman, who was presumed
to be dying. The Chicago Tribune notes "No other animal in a
Chicago-area zoo has ever drawn the crowds as Bushman did
in his stark steel cage." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/
politics/chi-chicagodays-bushman-story,0,1541189.story.

"In his stark steel cage."

From a June 1950 TIME magazine article titled "The Jovial Gorilla"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,857782,00.html

I quote the following passage "Bushman, even as a grey-thatched
elder gorilla, is one of the most fearsome-looking monsters ever put
behind bars. On seeing him for the first time, zoo visitors read a
promise of unspeakable ferocity in his black little eyes, his brutal,
purplish-black countenance, and his gleaming white incisors. Unlike
some older gorillas, he never developed a paunch; and his hairy
547 lbs. are all muscle."

"one of the most fearsome-looking monsters ever put
behind bars."

The Tribune article goes on to describe Bushman thusly:

"like a nightmare that escaped from darkness into daylight
and has exchanged its insubstantial form for 550 pounds of
solid flesh. His face is one that might be expected to gloat
through the troubled dreams that follow overindulgence. His
hand is the kind of thing a sleeper sees reaching for him
just before he wakes up screaming."

Yet, the various articles I Googled on Bushmen have titles like
"The Jovial Gorilla (Time)" and "Beloved Gorilla Still Charms
(NPR)," NPR's Daniel Pinkwater in his build up to a review of the
children's book Little Beauty tells us how he considered the 550
pound Gorilla his friend and suggests he and gorilla shared a tender
moment at the juncture of the stark steel cage where Bushman
resided.

Yet, in the Tribune article Bushman is described thusly:
Photographed often, the solitary animal was a temperamental
subject, often hurling food and his dung at photographers. Those
who had been pelted claimed the gorilla's aim was more accurate
than that of any Cubs or White Sox pitcher.

Things that make you go "hmmmm."

The great state of Wisconsin, where I reside, also had a superstar
gorilla, Sampson, who reigned at the Milwaukee County Zoo.
Sampson was a 650 pound behemoth whose cult of personality
grew in direct proportion to the ascendency of Milwaukee's growing
black community. It is a little known fact that at one time, due to the
proliferation of factories clustered in and around Milwaukee,

that Wisconsin blacks once had the distinction of earning the
highest per capital income of any blacks in America.

Yet, that story, like Sampson's, was not warm and cuddly.
Sampson did not take to his captivity kindly. Full of menace, he
would run and hurl his 650 pounds at the glass of his enclosure,

causing spectators to shriek in horror.

I think of that and the fact that blacks in Wisconsin, while
making up a scant 4 percent of the population, constitute

a full 50 percent of the state's prison population, making
them, for those of you counting at home, sixteen hundred

percent more unlawful than their white counterparts (and,
as I like to say, I went to school with white people, I work
with white people, I live next white people and I KNOW that
ain't true!).

I recall when the new 100 million dollar Milwaukee

County Jail was built (approved by ballot even as a
proposal for a 100 million dollar technical high school
was rejected), and the throngs of white people who came
and oohed and aahed as they toured the shiny new facility
before thousands of modern bushmen were incarcerated
there.