Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,948
By This is the grave of Octavius Catto.
Born into the free Black community in Charleston, South Carolina in 1839, Catto left the South as a child. His mother’s family had been free for generations but his father had been enslaved, was freed, and became a minister. He wanted nothing to do with staying in South Carolina. They moved to Baltimore and then Philadelphia. He was minister at the First African Presbyterian Church there and a member of the Banneker Institute, a center of Black intellectual and literary life. So that’s the world Catto grew up in and he filled his role. Catto went to the standard primary schools he could get into a Black child. He was able to desegregate an academy in Allentown, New Jersey, being the first Black student to study there. He then went back to Philadelphia to attend the Institute for Colored Youth. After he graduated from high school, with no university education available, he studied privately with tutors in Greek and Latin in Washington for a year.
Banneker came to become a warrior for civil rights in Philadelphia. The South was bad for Black folks but the North wasn’t paradise. He gave a speech for example about how white teachers treated their Black students, in 1864. A tidbit:
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, whose intelligence and success, measured by the fruits of their labors, could neither obtain nor secure for them positions which we know would be more congenial to their tastes.
Catto hoped that the Civil War would transform the government and America’s relationship with Black Americans, although he felt it would be a very long process and…he was sure right about that. He worked in education and became a school principal. Meanwhile, he helped raise Black troops to fight for the Union. Catto himself joined but never saw action.
In the aftermath of the war, Catto became a leader in the fight to desegregate Philadelphia’s streetcars. The City of Brotherly Love is the worse name for Philadelphia anyone could ever create. The city’s whites maintained a very strict system of segregation. Catto was not going to accept it. He, working with his finance Caroline LeCount, led the fight against it. His militant tactics got the attention of the New York Times in May 1865, which reported on him as such:
Last evening a colored man got into a Pine-street passenger car, and refused all entreaties to leave the car, where his presence appeared to be not desired.
The conductor of the car, fearful of being fined for ejecting him, as was done by the Judges of one of our courts in a similar case, ran the car off the track, detached the horses, and left the colored man to occupy the car all by himself.
The colored man still firmly maintains his position in the car, having spent the whole of the night there.
The conductor looks upon the part he enacted in the affair as a splendid piece of strategy.
The matter creates quite a sensation in the neighborhood where the car is standing, and crowds of sympathizers flock around the colored man.
Catto had an important ally in Pennsylvania politics in Thaddeus Stevens, who himself had allies in the state legislature. They got a state law passed that ended segregation in public transport. LeCount herself challenged when a streetcar conductor threw her off his car, which led to more enforcement mechanisms. This all helped push Pennsylvania to ratify the 15th Amendment in 1869, which was no easy task. It’s not as if the northern states mostly wanted to ratify the 15th Amendment. The reason that amendment even existed is that Congress was forcing southern states to allow Black male voting for readmission to the union and were increasingly embarrassed that almost no northern states allowed it.
Catto was also a big time athlete. He was a cricket player and like lots of American crickters, switched to baseball as it became more common in the late 1860s. He wanted to have an integrated baseball league, if not teams, but when his team applied to be part of a larger league, it was rejected for reasons of segregation. Nothing would be easy for Catto or Black Philadelphians.
And that leads us to the sad end of Catto’s life. During city elections in 1871, fights broke out between Black and Irish voters. An Irish guy named Frank Kelly pulled out a gun and shot Catto dead in the street. Kelly was of course not convicted of murder. Catto was 32 years old. The aftermath saw the decline of Black militant politics in Pennsylvania and the end of meaningful civil rights in that state for a very long time.
Again, all of this was in the North. It is not remotely surprising that Trumpism has won, which is the repeal of the Second Reconstruction that was the civil rights movements of the 60s, as historians have articulated. It’s a Third Reconstruction we need, not a second.
Catto is buried in Eden Cemetery, Collingdale, Pennsylvania. This is obivously a very new gravestone. In fact, he was originally buried in a different cemetery, but it was closed and all the bodies moved out here, where most were unmarked for a long time and many remain unmarked today.
If you would like this series to visit other figures of the Reconstruction Era, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Hiram Revels is in Holly Springs, Mississippi and Blanche Bruce is in Washington, D.C. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.