Octavius Catto: Activist, Educator, Abolitionist, Player

Abolitionist Octavius Catto was a Black baseball pioneer

By: Shakeia Taylor | @curlyfro

A 12-foot bronze statue of a single African American man stands just south of Philadelphia’s City Hall; it's the first of its kind in the city’s history. Erected in 2017, it was commissioned as a memorial to Octavius Valentine Catto – a civil rights activist, educator, abolitionist and baseball pioneer.

Born a free man in February 1839 in Charleston, S.C., Catto was raised in Philadelphia. He graduated from the Institute for Colored Youth, which later became the country’s first historically Black college, Cheyney University. Though he traveled to Washington, D.C., for postgraduate studies, Catto returned to the Institute a year later and was hired as a teacher.

Before moving to Pennsylvania, Catto’s family lived in Baltimore, where his father, William, an ordained Presbyterian minister, had planned to leave for Liberia as a missionary. It was discovered that William Catto had written a letter that the Charleston Presbytery believed to explain his intent to “excite discontent and insurrection among the slaves,” and the family fled north to avoid William being arrested. William had earned his freedom by becoming a minister, and Octavius learned the foundation of his abolition activism from his father.

During the Civil War, Catto was a major in the Pennsylvania National Guard. Serving on a committee that recruited soldiers for the Union Army, he joined Frederick Douglass and other Black leaders in the fight for emancipation and the abolition of slavery.

Along with Jacob C. White Jr., also an educator and activist, Catto founded the Pythian Base Ball club of Philadelphia in 1865. The Pythians were primarily composed of middle-class professionals from the Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York areas. As captain and star fielder for the team, Catto’s enthusiasm for baseball and his desire for equal rights intersected. The Pythians were an extremely talented and capable baseball team among Black ball clubs, and they wanted equal consideration from white clubs.

Catto used baseball to accomplish more than wealth; he believed Black credibility and acceptance could be promoted by competing against white teams on a baseball diamond. Baseball’s growing popularity helped drive his civil rights efforts. It was sport as activism and activism as sport. In 1869, the Pythians issued a challenge to every white team in Philadelphia: play us. Their challenge was accepted, and they made history when they played the first documented game of interracial baseball against the Olympics, Philadelphia’s oldest white baseball club.

Read more ….

https://www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/players/octavius-catto?partnerId=zh-20220223-550767-mlb-1-A&qid=1026&utm_id=zh-20220223-550767-mlb-1-A&bt_ee=But5NAtMQHuU9%2BRisrvhHk7EekLGnsBA9QMk%2F3bR4StZLSb82SXZyWZyIC5ZJ6o9&bt_ts=1645627050583