Virginia Theological Seminary and CollegeIn January 1910, at age twenty-six, Ota Benga moved to Lynchburg to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and College, a Black Baptist school located in Durmid, a suburb south of the city. Ever since the scandal at the zoo, and largely thanks to the advocacy of seminary president Gregory W. Hayes, Benga’s guardians had sought to send him to Lynchburg. They believed the seminary would give him the best chance to receive a formal education and convert to Christianity, and, in doing so, he would support their larger goal of proving that Africans did not possess inferior intelligence.