Octavius Catto

Octavius Valentine Catto was born free on 22 February 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, William Catto, was a minister who moved the family north around 1850 to become pastor of the First African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. By 1854 Octavius was a student at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he graduated as valedictorian in 1858.

After furthering his studies in Washington, D.C., he returned to the Institute as an instructor of literature, mathematics, Greek and Latin and later became the principal for male students. He also became a leading figure in Philadelphia's civil rights movement, helping to organise the Pennsylvania State Equal Rights League, which campaigned for Black suffrage, equal education and the desegregation of streetcars.

During the Civil War Catto worked with Frederick Douglass to recruit African Americans to fight for the Union, and he served as a major in the Pennsylvania National Guard. He was a gifted athlete and, with his friend Jacob White Jr., formed the Philadelphia Pythians, one of the city's first Black baseball clubs, which he co-managed and played for.

In September 1869 the Pythians played the all-white Olympics in what is considered the first documented interracial baseball game, losing 44 to 23, in a challenge meant to show Black Americans' right to equality. Catto's campaign to desegregate Philadelphia's horse-drawn streetcars succeeded when Pennsylvania banned segregation on public transport in 1867.

On 10 October 1871, the first Election Day after the Fifteenth Amendment, when Black men voted in large numbers, violence broke out around Philadelphia's polling places. Catto cast his vote, then was confronted near his home and shot dead by a Democratic operative, Frank Kelly. He was 32. His funeral was the largest procession in the city since Abraham Lincoln's in 1865, and a bronze memorial to him was unveiled outside City Hall in 2017.