“Without Fear and Without Reproach”: Octavius V. Catto and the Early Civil Rights Movement in Pennsylvania

A Quest for Parity: The Octavius V. Catto Memorial was created by sculptor Branly Cadet and installed at the southwest corner of Philadelphia City Hall in 2017. The memorial is a sculpture group that includes a 12-foot bronze statue of Catto on a granite base, a granite and stainless steel sculpture in front of the statue symbolizing a ballot box, and five granite pillars representing the streetcars Catto fought to desegregate.
Photo by Alec Rogers, Courtesy of Association for Public Art

On Tuesday, September 26, 2017, the City of Philadelphia unveiled a monument to Octavius V. Catto in a ceremony at the southwestern apron of City Hall. Catto was a cornerstone figure in Philadelphia’s early civil rights struggle — a recruiter of an African American militia during the Civil War, an instrumental figure in the victory to desegregate Philadelphia’s horse-drawn streetcars, a pioneering baseball player who endeavored to integrate the sport, and an advocate for Black suffrage across the commonwealth.

“For most of his adult life he could not vote or ride freely on mass transportation,” said Branly Cadet, the sculptor of the Catto memorial, at a press conference for the unveiling. “I became keenly aware that both the political establishment and mass transportation on this site were radically transformed as a result of the actions that Octavius Catto and his contemporaries took.” As a veteran artist, Cadet has sculpted tributes to Jackie Robinson outside Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in New York City. But the monument to Catto, Cadet admitted at the unveiling, is his prize accomplishment. “I am a child of Octavius Catto’s envisioned future, a future he helped create and paid for with his life,” explained Cadet. “A future I get to live.”

Catto was tragically murdered on October 10, 1871, while preparing himself to protect African American voters in Philadelphia. In later decades, witnesses to his death vividly recalled the anguish they felt on that solemn day in interviews with W.E.B. Du Bois, author of The Philadelphia Negro. Du Bois’ account of that moment in history depicts the ambience surrounding the murder as “a revival of the old slavery-time riots in the day when they were first tasting freedom.”

Octavius Valentine Catto was born free, the third of four children, in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 22, 1839, to William Thomas Catto, a millwright who was formerly enslaved, and Sarah Isabella Cain, a biracial member of a distinguished Charleston family, the Cain-Dewees.

Sarah died in childbirth in 1845 and William remarried. Previously in 1844 he had joined Charleston’s Second Presbyterian Church and sought a candidacy for the ministry. He promptly commenced his divinity studies at the church’s seminary, and by 1847 began preaching to large crowds of African Americans in Columbia. Later that year, he passed his divinity examination and was informed he would minister in the Liberian coast town Nanna Kroo.

In 1848 the family embarked to Baltimore to await passage to Liberia. During that time, it appears William became involved in the Underground Railroad. The Presbytery got wind of this and immediately purged his ministry license. Just as slave catchers received a report on William’s illegal antislavery activities, Maryland had issued a warrant for his arrest. In a moment’s time, he rushed the family to Philadelphia. Frederick Douglass recounted the story in the North Star. William “was without the means of escape, having no papers, but finally succeeded after much difficulty in getting beyond the limits of Maryland.”

Catto graduated from the Institute of Colored Youth, located on Lombard Street in Philadelphia, in 1858 and began teaching there in 1859. The school was moved in 1866 to this building at Ninth and Bainbridge streets, where Catto continued to teach until his death in 1871.
Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and Picture Collection

Octavius Catto was 9 when he arrived in Philadelphia. The city was a hub of the antislavery revolution at the time. Black and white abolitionists had been working for the cause of freedom after generations of constructing schools for African American children, raising legal funds for cases of illegal kidnapping of free Blacks, and working covertly to aid freedom seekers and agents on the Underground Railroad. Quakers Angelina Grimké Weld, Lucretia Mott and Richard Humphreys, along with other white antislavery leaders, such as James Miller McKim, Mary Grew and Passmore Williamson, worked tirelessly for the safety and education of Black Philadelphians. Of Philadelphia’s 225,000 residents in 1850, one of every 13 was African American. The city’s 19,000 Black citizens were centered in the South Street corridor, from Pine Street south to Shippen, and from the Delaware River west to 11th, where narrow streets housed some of the abolitionist movement’s most prominent African American figures: William Still, Robert Purvis, Jacob C. White, David Bustill Bowser and, for a time, Harriet Tubman.

In 1854, at age 15, Catto enrolled in Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth (ICY), founded as an agricultural and industrial school by Humphreys, who in 1837 bequeathed $10,000 to establish an institution on 136 acres outside the city to educate people of African descent. By the 1850s the school had become, according to historian Murray Dubin, “an experiment in education” because it was a school for Black students with Black teachers. By offering coursework in composition, history, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, surveying, navigation, natural philosophy, chemistry, mechanical drafting, anatomy, physiology, Greek and Latin, ICY prepared students for intellectual careers — an educational mission preceding W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of the Talented Tenth.

Catto spent three of his four years at ICY under the tutelage of Charles L. Reason (1818–93), who had studied at the African Free School in New York City, where he bonded with classmates Henry Highland Garnet, William Wells Brown and James McCune Smith. On occasion, Reason invited abolitionist friends Garnet and Charles Lenox Remond to ICY to lecture to the students. Reason returned to New York at the start of Catto’s senior year and was succeeded by Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett (1833–1908), a Yale graduate and future ambassador to Haiti. In just one school year, Catto impressed Bassett as a scholar. The principal once commended Catto for “outstanding scholarly work, great energy, and perseverance of school matters.”

In the spring of 1858 Catto graduated as valedictorian of his class at ICY. He then applied and won acceptance into the exclusive Banneker Institute, a private literary and debate society founded in 1853 and named after African American mathematician Benjamin Banneker. Members of the Banneker Institute underwent an unforgiving entrance examination demonstrating intellectual acumen in linguistics, philosophy, history and justice. Membership to the institute was by invitation only, and nominations had to be given by someone already a member to the group. Within months, Catto became Banneker’s corresponding secretary and evening lecturer on subjects ranging from ancient Egypt to modern language.

There was no escaping the political climate of the moment. At the age of 21, Catto got involved with his first antislavery case when Moses Horner, a fugitive from Virginia, had been captured near Harrisburg on March 27, 1860, and taken to Philadelphia for trial. After the magistrate decided Horner was to be returned to the Virginia slaveholder, a group of Black men tried to rescue him from a transport coach on Chestnut Street. Police beat off the attempt and arrested five of the rescuers. One of those apprehended was Alfred Green, a 27-year-old Banneker Institute member. Two days later, Catto led a group of Banneker men in launching a defense fund for the five Horner rescuers by advertising for donations in the Black press.

Frederick Douglass composed the words on this 1863 broadside calling for African American men to volunteer for three years of service in the Union Army during the Civil War. It was signed by Catto and 54 other Black leaders.
Wikimedia Commons

Events such as these ignited racial tensions in the nation, but when the Civil War erupted in April 1861, African Americans were split over how to contribute to the Union cause. While the African Methodist Episcopal Church refused to endorse enlistment of African Americans into militia units, Black leaders from Ohio to New York formed volunteer militias ready to fight. Owing much to the influence of his antiwar father, who was at the time a pastor in the District of Columbia, Catto spent the war’s early days avoiding politics, choosing instead to teach linguistics at his alma mater, the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth.

The June 1863 commencement ceremony for ICY graduates featured keynote speeches by Henry Highland Garnet and one student, Caroline Le Count (1846–1923), the daughter of an undertaker who hid freedom seekers in coffins. Like Catto years earlier, Le Count was class valedictorian. Her speech was titled “The Cultivation of Taste,” an homage to the current wave of liberty undertaken by a new generation of African American male and female leaders. She spent the next school year at the Pennsylvania Medical College before returning to ICY to teach. Within a few years, Catto and Le Count would find themselves in a courtship while working together on social justice causes in Philadelphia.

Although President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was a joyful moment for Catto, it was the Gettysburg Campaign that would change his war convictions. The movement of Confederate soldiers through Union garrisons in Virginia to capture a thousand horses on their way to Harrisburg caused alarm. Pennsylvania governor Andrew Gregg Curtin declared martial law and pled for short-term militias, including African American volunteers, to serve only for the duration of the emergency to stop the encroaching Confederate army. In June, Catto signed his name to a large recruiting broadside reading “Men of Color To Arms! . . . Now or Never . . . This is our golden moment” and helped plaster copies throughout the city. Catto then solicited the help of Jacob “Jake” White Jr. (1837–1902), the son of entrepreneur and abolitionist Jacob C. White, to muster a company of 90 African American volunteers to serve in the impending conflict. Philadelphia mayor Alexander Henry (1823–83) ensured that Catto’s company received overcoats and blankets and saw the men off from Independence Square bound for Camp Curtin in Harrisburg.

Upon its arrival in Harrisburg, Catto’s company was turned away by Maj. Gen. Darius Couch, who ignored Governor Curtin’s order to accept Black volunteers. Though some of his 90 men would enlist again, Catto never saw combat. In July, he helped recruit Black soldiers who would muster at Camp William Penn, north of Philadelphia in Cheltenham Township, which had been recently established for training African American troops. In honor of his efforts in helping to raise the first 10 companies of Black soldiers, each made up of 80 men, he was awarded the regimental flag on behalf of the 24th United States Colored Infantry Regiment. He would spend the remainder of the Civil War recruiting soldiers for the United States Colored Troops (USCT) and fighting for equality in Philadelphia.

At the 1864 ICY commencement ceremony, Catto gave a speech for the ages. After addressing education as “the very moral conception of individual and mutual rights of property, contract, and government,” he spoke at length about the value of culturally responsive schools. He railed against white teachers who lack knowledge of the Black experience in America, failing to understand African American culture and ignoring systemic injustices while instructing Black students. “It is at least unjust to allow a blind and ignorant prejudice to so far disregard the choice of parents and the will of the colored tax-payers, as to appoint over colored children white teachers.” He then called for ICY graduates to go into the South, where the military had constructed schools for recently emancipated African Americans, so that Black educators could assume positions at those schools.

Octavius Catto was photographed at the studio of Broadbent and Phillips at 1206 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, circa 1871. After his assassination, the portrait was printed as a carte de visite hailing him as a “Martyr to the cause of Constitutional Liberty.”
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

The speech was Catto’s foray into the politics of the expanding equal rights movement. In October 1864, leading African American figures launched the National Equal Rights League (NERL) at a Syracuse conference to promote full and immediate citizenship for African Americans. By aligning with the Republican Party, NERL would spend years lobbying Congress to ratify the 14th and 15th amendments. Likewise, state auxiliaries, like the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League (PSERL), quickly became associated with state and local elections to ensure political power, legal rights, and a fair education system.

Dating back to 1859, abolitionists in Philadelphia had been fighting to integrate the city’s horse-drawn streetcars. William Still (1821–1902) wrote to the newspapers calling the exclusion from the city’s passenger cars “the sore grievance of genteel people.” Now, in 1865, by way of speeches urging “there must come a change,” Catto inspired Black Philadelphians into civil disobedient protest by daring to occupy seats on the streetcars, some 20 feet long, in violation of segregation policies. Catto’s campaign left conductors no choice but to forcibly unseat Black protesters. Police officers responded by launching mass arrests.

The movement to integrate Philadelphia’s streetcars would endure for years. In the meantime, Catto helped to organize a grand review of the USCT. In May 1865 white Union soldiers were honored in the Grand Review of the Armies in Washington, D.C. Despite their service, African American Union soldiers were not invited to that celebration. PSERL, the Garnet League (a Harrisburg equal rights organization), and African American women of the capital city collaborated on the USCT Grand Review to celebrate the more than 180,000 Black soldiers who served in the Union Army, including the 36,000 who died in service and the 68,000 more who eventually succumbed to wounds resulting from service to their country during the war. The event was held in Harrisburg on November 14, 1865. Following a parade around the Capitol, keystone speeches were delivered by Thomas Morris Chester, Stephen Smith, William Howard Day and Catto.

Catto ended up spending a lot of time in Harrisburg after the USCT Grand Review. His streetcar committee, which also included abolitionist William Forten (1823–1909) and artist David Bustill Bowser (1820–1900), urged lawmakers at the Capitol to pass a new bill that would issue a $100 to $500 fine per passenger against any railroad company or employee that barred or helped bar passengers “on account of color or race.” Violations would be a criminal misdemeanor that also included imprisonment for 30 to 90 days. Republican senator Morrow Lowry from Erie advanced the bill through the General Assembly, which passed by a party-line vote of 50 to 27. Republican governor John W. Geary signed the bill on March 22, 1867.

To test the law, three days later, 21-year-old Caroline Le Count, then working as a teacher at ICY and soon to be Catto’s fiancée, attempted to board a streetcar at 11th and Lombard streets. The conductor, Edwin F. Thompson, refused her a seat while addressing her with a racial slur. She wrote down the streetcar’s number, gathered a witness, and promptly filed a complaint. In court, she presented a copy of the Philadelphia Press with the news that Governor Geary had signed the law. She also obtained a certified copy of the law from the state office. The judge fined Thompson $100.

Geary had signed Pennsylvania’s streetcar law a year before the adoption of the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship rights and equal protection for all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. While racial progress in affairs of mass transit stressed relations between African Americans and whites in Philadelphia, by the end of the 1860s, the process of integrating the city had not yet become overly personal. Public schools would remain segregated for another decade. Moreover, African Americans could not yet vote.

This scorecard records the statistics of Pythian “batsmen” for a game played against the Active of West Chester on August 24, 1868. The Pythians were victorious with a score of 31–9. Catto, noted as playing shortstop in the field, hit four runs. The Pythians were undefeated in the 1868 season with a record of 6–0–1.
Leon and Beatrice M. Gardiner Collection, reproduced with permission fron the Historical Society of Pennsylvania

In another realm, Catto, an excellent cricket player during his years as a student at ICY, reckoned that sports possessed the possibility of shaping the contours and the trajectory of racial equality. During the Reconstruction era, he saw baseball, a novel American pastime, as a way to move the country closer to a multiracial democracy. In 1866 he joined other Black Philadelphians, many of whom had been cricket players and graduates of ICY, in playing exhibition games of baseball. Crowds at these games were composed of auxiliary members of the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League and Republican Party officials. Soon, Catto’s team took the name Philadelphia Pythians, after the Knights of Pythias Lodge, and started playing contests at Diamond Cottage Park in Camden, New Jersey, because African Americans had been prevented from playing games at local parks. After efforts to desegregate parks in Philadelphia succeeded, Catto, serving as the team’s unofficial manager (it would be another year until the Pythians established a board of directors and elected officers), arranged games at Parade Grounds at the corner of 11th and Wharton streets, near the neighborhood of Moyamensing. The Pythians played their first game in Philadelphia on October 3, 1866, which resulted in a 70–15 loss to the Bachelors of Albany, New York.

In 1867 Catto became the Pythians’ field captain and manager. With the help of club secretary Jacob C. White, Catto’s team arranged a 13-game season during the summer months. The schedule included competitions in Baltimore, Harrisburg, Camden and Washington, D.C. By the end of the summer, the Pythians recorded eight wins and three losses, with the results of two games unreported.

In October 1867 Catto submitted an application on behalf of the Pythians for admission to the Pennsylvania Association of Amateur Base Ball Players, the first organization governing baseball. When it became clear the association was not going to accept a Black team, Catto withdrew the application. His intuition was correct. The association voted in December against admitting any club “composed of one or more colored persons.” The association’s decision to create a color line in American baseball was a surprising blow to the equal rights movement.

In Philadelphia, attitudes deteriorated on February 3, 1870, when the 15th Amendment, granting suffrage to African American men, was ratified. Sociopolitical relations were strained further by the language of Pennsylvania’s constitution. It was last ratified in 1838, allowing only white men to vote in state elections. The new federal amendment, however, set off a violent backlash in the city. On the day of the first statewide election in the fall of 1870, Philadelphia alderman William McMullen, who maintained power in the city for his ability to control jobs, organized a ring of hooligans to harass Black voters.

The following year’s state election proved to be one of the darker days in Pennsylvania’s history. On October 10, 1871, Catto and other Black Philadelphians saw an opportunity to fill seats on the city council and in the mayor’s office with Republican candidates sympathetic to Black male suffrage. But during the evening before the election, McMullen met with Democrat bartender Frank Kelly to discuss plans to control the Black vote and to cast false ballots at precincts scattered throughout the city.

Catto spent the first half of election day distributing voting tickets to African American voters and teaching class at ICY, which had been relocated to Ninth and Bainbridge streets. It was not long into the day, however, when McMullen’s men started beating and shooting Black voters. The violence became so widespread that by 1 o’clock, Catto closed school early for the students’ safety. He had been warned by James Milliken, the assistant adjutant of the Fifth Brigade, to arm himself with a pistol and a sword and report to headquarters at Broad and Race streets later that evening. Catto already had a sword but needed a pistol, so he purchased a firearm at a local pawnshop but had to return home to retrieve bullets. At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Kelly crossed Catto on South Street. After an initial moment of silence, Kelly pulled out a gun and shot Catto in both arms, the left thigh, and the heart.

The murder of the 32-year-old Catto cast a shadow over a great Republican victory in 1871. At a grand jubilee celebration held on the east lawn of the Capitol park in Harrisburg, Catto’s friend in the civil rights struggle, William Howard Day, told the crowd of more than 1,000 persons, “[Catto] was an upright Christian, whose piety was lofty and sincere; a pure-minded patriot, who served his country in her darkest hour; a courteous gentleman and valiant soldier, who died as he had lived, without fear and without reproach.”

W.E.B. Du Bois called Catto’s funeral in Philadelphia, “the most imposing ever given to an American Negro.” Catto’s body first lay in state at the City Armory on Broad and Race streets from 7 until 10 o’clock in the morning. Newspaper reports indicate that more than 5,000 people viewed the corpse. In a drizzling rain, the funeral cortège of carriages, military companies and musical bands paraded down Broad Street before reaching Mount Lebanon Cemetery shortly before 2 o’clock. As the casket closed, Caroline Le Count cried out, “Octavius! Octavius! Take me with you!”

A Quest for Parity was unveiled in Philadelphia at a dedication ceremony on September 26, 2017.
S. Madera for City of Philadelphia

Witnesses and a police officer failed to chase down Kelly that fateful day. In fact, Kelly eluded authorities for years. He was discovered in January 1877 living in Chicago under the alias Charles Young. He was extradited to Philadelphia for the murder trial. On May 4, 1877, an all-white jury found Kelly not guilty. The memorializing of Catto began shortly after his death. Philadelphia’s first public school for Black students taught by Black educators was dedicated at the corner of Lombard and 20th streets on April 17, 1879, and was named the Octavius V. Catto High School. Caroline Le Count was its first principal. And today there sits a monument at the center of Philadelphia dedicated to Catto’s ultimate sacrifice. Officially called A Quest for Parity, the monument consists of a 12-foot bronze statue of Catto, flanked by five granite pillars fashioned like upturned streetcars, and a stainless-steel ballot box resting on a broad table. His story, and this monument, exist to help the public appreciate the contributions of forgotten heroes who helped to build a more perfect union.

Further Reading

Biddle, Daniel R., and Murray Dubin. Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010. / Casway, Jerold. “Octavius Catto and the Pythains of Philadelphia.” Pennsylvania Legacies 7, no. 1 (May 2007): 5–9. / Du Bois, W.E.B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899. / Griffin, Henry H. The Trial of Frank Kelly, for the Assassination and Murder of Octavius V. Catto, on October 10, 1871. Detroit: Gale, 2012. / James, Milton M. “The Institute for Colored Youth.” Negro History Bulletin 21, no. 4 (January 1958): 83-85. / Swanson, Ryan A. When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime. Lincoln: University of Nebraska University Press, 2014.

Todd M. Mealy, Ph.D., resides in Lancaster County where he teaches at Penn Manor High School. He is the author of six books and is a frequent contributor to Pennsylvania Heritage. His previous articles include “Fighter’s Heaven: Muhammad Ali’s Training Camp in the Pennsylvania Wilderness (Fall 2020), “Indomitable: Ora Washington, Philadelphia’s Ultimate Sports Trailblazer” (Winter 2020), and “Breaking the Color Line: The Trial That Led to the End of Legal Segregation in Pennsylvania’s Schools” (Summer 2016).