Queer Places:
Prison Cemetery, Attica, NY 14011, United States
Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola was born Joseph Howard Lee in 1887 as the eleventh child of an impoverished Black family in Baltimore, Maryland.
Navigating a deeply racist Western society with minimal formal education, Lee relied on his creative talent to construct a complex stage persona. He
reinvented himself as "Ibn LoBagola," a native of the French Sudan and a "Black Jew" descended from refugees who had fled the Holy Land after the
destruction of Herod’s Temple. Capitalizing on the early twentieth-century Western fascination with exoticism, he embarked on a long career delivering
public lectures and participating in debates across the United States and abroad.
During World War I, Lee attempted to enlist in the United States Army, but his initial acceptance was revoked when military officials discovered his
arrest record for "sexual immorality" and "perversion." Seeking another path into service, he volunteered for the manpower-starved British Army, which
was recruiting in the United States and accepted him despite his record.
Throughout his adult life, Lee navigated his identity as a gay man during an era when non-heterosexual relationships were heavily criminalized and
social role models were nonexistent. His personal life was marked by frequent legal troubles and arrests related to his homosexual activities, which
often involved underage individuals. Facing law enforcement scrutiny and an arrest record on the East Coast, Lee brought his lecture tour to the Midwest,
speaking in cities across Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin, including engagements at Oshkosh State Teachers College, Madison Central High, and a
scheduled stop in Kenosha.
While in Kenosha, two fifteen-year-old boys reported to YMCA counselors that the forty-four-year-old lecturer had engaged in oral sex with them,
prompting a police investigation and an inquiry by Scotland Yard into his past activities in London. Facing trial, he was convicted and sentenced to
serve one to five years on each charge.
The conviction triggered an investigation by United States immigration officials, who threatened him with deportation under the belief that he was a
foreign national. To avoid deportation, Lee confessed his true origin as Joseph Howard Lee from Baltimore. After serving his Wisconsin prison term, he
was extradited back to New York for violating his parole from a prior conviction.
During his literary career, Lee published articles in Scribner’s Magazine in 1929, which led the publisher A.A. Knopf to release his picaresque
pseudo-biography, LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story. He spent his final years incarcerated in Attica Prison, where he died of pulmonary edema in
1947 with eighteen months remaining on his sentence. He was buried in the prison cemetery under a cement headstone bearing his chosen name, Ibn
LoBagola.
References:
Other references:
- LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930 / London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930)
- The Folk Tales of a Savage (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1930)
- "An African Savage's Own Story" Series (Scribner’s Magazine, 1929)
- Bata Kindai Amgoza Ibn LoBagola Papers (Sc MG 142)
- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library.
- University of Pennsylvania Museum Archives
- Penn Museum, Philadelphia, PA
- Killingray, David, and Willie Henderson. "Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola and the Making of An African Savage's Own Story." In Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business, edited by Bernth Lindfors, pp. 228–265. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.
- Pezzati, Alex. "The Scholar and the Impostor." Expedition Magazine, Vol. 47, No. 2 (2005), Penn Museum, pp. 6–7.
- Best, Wallace. "'A Rare Human Document': LoBagola's African American Humbug Religion." Journal of Africana Religions (2019).
- Futility Closet Podcast. "Episode 128: An African Savage." (2016).
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