October 10, 1871: Octavius Valentine Catto is murdered in Philadelphia. He was an abolitionist and educator, and also an early black baseball player.
He was born on February 22, 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina. He and his mother, the former Sarah Isabella Cain, were members of the DeReef family, a prominent mixed-race family that had lived free for decades in that city whose resistance to the abolition of slavery would lead to it hosting the 1860 Democratic National Convention and the first secession convention later that year. His father, William T. Catto, was a slave who had bought his freedom, and been ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He took his family north to Baltimore and then Philadelphia.
In 1853, at age 14, Octavius began attending a previously all-white school, Allentown Academy in Allentown, Monmouth County, New Jersey. (It's about 40 miles northeast of Philadelphia, and 60 miles southwest of New York.) After 1 year there, he attended Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth, where he was praised by principal Ebenezer Bassett for "outstanding scholarly work, great energy, and perseverance in school matters." He later taught English and math at the ICY.
During the American Civil War, he joined with Frederick Douglass and the Union League, headquartered in Philadelphia, to form a Recruitment Committee to sign black men to fight for the Union and, with victory, the abolition of slavery. He helped raise 11 regiments that were sent to the front. He was commissioned in the U.S. Army with the rank of Major, but did not see combat himself.
After the Civil War, predating the Montgomery Bus Boycott by 90 years, Catto fought for the desegregation of Philadelphia's trolleys and streetcars. Moved by his action, Representatives Thaddeus Stevens and William D. Kelley, both of Pennsylvania, pushed through Congress a bill desegregating public transit. This would last nationally until the Plessy v. Ferguson case in 1896, but the various vehicles in Philadelphia remained integrated.
Octavius Catto was among the generation of young American men who had begun an athletic career by playing cricket and later switched to its cousin, baseball -- then, usually spelled as two words, "base ball." In 1865, he and fellow ICY graduate Jacob C. White Jr. founded the Pythian Base Ball Club. They were named after the Knights of Pythias, to which several of its members belonged, named for the Greek myth of Damon and Pythias, a legendary story of friendship and dedication.
Initially, the Club was made up of young black professionals from what would later be called the Northeast Corridor, Boston to Washington, but mostly Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. In 1867, the Club played its 1st season, playing home games at Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and went undefeated. They did so again in 1868.
On September 4, 1869, in what is the earliest known recorded game between an all-black team and an all-white team, the Pythians sustained their 1st defeat, to the Olympics of Washington. A few days later, they played another all-white team, the Philadelphia City Items, a team sponsored by a newspaper, and won. Both times, the local newspapers, including the defeated City Item, praised the Pythians for their performance and their class.
These games took place toward the end of the season of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the world's 1st openly professional baseball team; and 2 months before the 1st American football game, played nearby between Rutgers and the school that would later be known as Princeton. The following year, 1870, the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, granting all men age 21 and up the right to vote, regardless of race.
October 10, 1871 was Election Day in Philadelphia. Like most black men at the time, Octavius Catto was a Republican, of the party of the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, and of the current President, who had been the leading Union General, and the leader of the "Reconstruction" of the South along Northern lines, Ulysses S. Grant.
White Protestants were mainly English and Republican. White Catholics were mainly Irish and Democratic. (This was before the great waves of Italian and Slavic immigrants arrived to broaden the ethnic range of Catholic America.) So, with the exception of the question of helping the poor and immigrants, it was then the Republicans who were the liberals, and the Democrats who were the conservatives. This was a long time ago: 150 years. A century and a half.
In previous elections, Catto had been harassed on the way to voting, and, anticipating this, he had a gun on him. So did Frank Kelly, a Democrat who, as far as I can determine, did not previously know Catto, and so his motive, while prejudicial, was probably not personal.
Kelly shot Catto 3 times at the corner of 9th & South Streets, a few steps from Catto's home at 812 South Street. Kelly was acquitted of the murder. Apparently, despite being a Northern city, in Philadelphia, at that time, a white man could get away with murdering a black man.
Catto was just 32 years old. He was buried at Eden Cemetery, the oldest surviving cemetery for black people in America, in suburban Collindale, Pennsylvania.
Also buried there is opera singer Marian Anderson, a Philly native whose concert at Constitution Hall in Washington, for Easter 1939, was canceled by its owners, the Daughters of the American Revolution. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt not only resigned from the DAR, but she talked her husband, President Franklin D Roosevelt, into allowing her to perform at the Lincoln Memorial, live over the national radio networks. Over 75,000 people attended, the biggest crowd to come to the Memorial until the 1963 March On Washington.
Catto's tombstone is engraved, "THE FORGOTTEN HERO." With the passage of time, he was, indeed, forgotten. Sojourner Truth lived on until 1883, Frederick Douglass to 1895, and Harriet Tubman to 1913, and were able to continue to speak for themselves, in interviews, articles and books. By the time the modern Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s, their names were looked to as inspirations. But Catto, even though he had done his era's equivalent of a bus boycott, and in a city far larger than Montgomery, Alabama, was not cited as an influence.
Despite being a baseball nut, and living close enough to Philadelphia to have visited many times, I had never heard of Octavius Catto until I was in my late 40s.
In 2006, a movement began to get him a statue. In 2018, the statue, named "A Quest for Parity," sculpted by Branly Cadet, was placed on the south side of City Hall, at the geographic center of the City of Philadelphia.
It is that city's 1st statue in honor of a specific black person. Think about that for a moment: Philadelphia is one of America's leading cities in the African-American experience, and yet a fictional white character, Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, had a statue before any black person. True, there are statues of Wilt Chamberlain and Julius Erving outside the Wells Fargo Center arena, but those were erected and dedicated by the 76ers, not the City government.
I had hoped that the Catto statue would be on the north side of City Hall, so he could stare down the statue across the street, that of the infamously racist Police Commissioner (1967-71) and Mayor (1972-80) Frank Rizzo. Instead, it faces his old neighborhood. It's academic now: The Rizzo statue was removed in 2020.
October 10, 1871 was a Tuesday. Although the National Association season had not yet concluded, there were no games played on the day.
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