Face-to-Face: Octavius V. Catto portrait

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Octavius Catto, 1839-1871 --

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-- African American civil rights leader, early baseball organizer, and martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty.

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This is a 'carte de visite' from 1871, it was published in Harper's Weekly soon after his death during the election season of 1871.

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I would venture to guess that Octavius Catto is the least well-known of any of the people in our permanent collection.

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We know the major figures of the civil rights movement of both the 19th and 20th century --

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Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King -- but here we have Octavius Catto,

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somebody who, in the words of a great historian, Edward Thompson, has been hidden from history.

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And we've brought him back essentially to life, bringing his career, his personality, his achievements,

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his triumph and finally the heartbreak of his death to the walls of the National Portrait Gallery in this exhibition that we're co-sponsoring with the National Museum of African American History.

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Octavius Catto was an exceptional person because of his very presence in the leading, in the leading edge, in-in the middle nineteenth century as an African American activist for civil rights and the maintenance and assertion of an African American presence in the American polity and culture.

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Catto was born in Charleston, South Carolina, son of a free black minister who began as a millwright and it would be interesting to know exactly how Catto's father, about whom we know little, was able first to free himself from slavery and secondly to set himself up as a preacher.

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What kind of parish did he have? Who were his parishioners- were they slave and free? Was the audience segregated? In other words, how exactly did this man, his father, navigate the racial and class dimensions of Charleston, South Carolina society in the 1830s and 40s.

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What we do know is that Octavius Catto ended up in Philadelphia probably as a [[result]]

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--go north as the war approached and as South Carolina's draconian black laws were put into ever-increasing, ever more firm effect.

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It became dangerous to be black in South Carolina at all times, but more so in the 1850s,

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as the regime's commitment to a pos-- slavery,

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defending slavery as a positive good

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and its aggressive stance towards the North helped lead the battle towards secession.

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In the midst of South Carolina's incredibly segregated and well-enforced black and slave codes,

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it would be fascinating to know exactly how Catto's father became a freed man

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and what exactly it entailed for him to have a ministry in Charleston's small, but influential, free black community.

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Nonetheless, at some point in the 1840s,

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well after the racial laws had come down hard on Charleston's blacks,

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the elder Catto decided to move his family to Philadelphia

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which, at the time, was probably the most advanced anti-slavery city in the United States.

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Even in Boston, which was the home of William Lloyd Garrison,

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there was rioting and mobbing, as working class whites allied with old conservatives, took opposition to the abolitionist cause.

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Philadelphia, with its Quaker heritage of absolute opposition to slavery,

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provided something of a haven for free blacks.

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Catto, in his life, and one of the reasons for the dimensions of his tragedy, did everything right.

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He educated himself at the Institute for Colored Youth.

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He spent several years working in the Washington, D.C. area tutoring and getting what he called a postgraduate education,

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although it's not known if he ever received an official degree.

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He then went back to the Institute of Colored Youth in Philadelphia where he became a professor and teacher.

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He joined the Banneker Institute, as well as the Franklin Institute-- two major important Philadelphia scientific and cultural societies.

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The Banneker institute is, of course, is named after Benjamin Banneker, the scientist who-- and surveyor who laid out the dimensions of the early District of Columbia.

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And the Franklin Institute admitted Catto despite his race and over the opposition of some of its other members.

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Not only was Catto interested and a major supporter of early efforts to educate blacks,

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he saw that as an essential necessity as, particularly during the Civil War,

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when it became clear that the problem of reconstruction would be as important as the problem of winning the war,

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he felt that black men and women had to be educated in order to take on the [[challenges?]]--

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On the cultural side, Catto was one of the first organizers of a baseball team, black or white, in the United States, putting the lie to the notion that baseball was invented during the Civil War by Abner Doubleday.

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Catto founded the Pythian team. Pythian, named after the ancient site of one of the Greek games. Again, a classical allusion, which bespeaks Catto's own interest in the classics, as well as in education.

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And the team played among other organized, informally and formally, uh, in Philadelphia and up and down the east coast. They had difficulty arranging games with white teams, but they did play several, um, against teams from New York as well as competing in their own league.

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During the war, Catto worked assiduously with Frederick Douglass and other civil rights leaders in order to raise black troops to be sent to the Union lines.

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After the invasion of Phil- of Pennsylvania by Robert E. Lee in 1863, Catto raised several divisions and in a commissioning ceremony in Harrisburg he presented those divisions to the Pennsylvania governor along with a flag of their, of his own devising.

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What Catto recognized was, in his twin commitments to education and raising troops, was the importance of black people to empower themselves either through education or by fighting on the side of the Union cause to help liberate themselves.

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And I can't emphasize enough how, the-the import, how important it was that Catto raised troops and contributed to a black presence in the Union Army.

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This was a central feature in the liberation of black people in America, um, from slavery and bondage -

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because it invested them, not only by blood, that they bore blood as witnesses against their previous oppression and overturning the institution of slavery,

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but it demonstrated to white society -- which had seen blacks as incompetent, unable to be organized, unable to lead, unable to fight, essentially cowardly, we know all the racial stereotypes -- it demonstrated to white society that blacks deserved to be-- [[free?]].

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entitled, empowered, and involved in the cultural--cultural life and political life of the nation.

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Um, After the war-- with the war won --Catto, like most other blacks and the American political system generally, turned to the problem of civil, of reconstruction -

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that just because blacks were no longer slaves did not mean they had civil rights. He worked and lobbied to pass the three great amendments - the thirteenth through the fifteenth - which guaranteed blacks the right to vote as well as full citizenship and made slavery illegal, now and forever.

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Locally in Philadelphia, he was one of the pioneers in breaking down the segregated transportation system.

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And he w-was an an early advocate of passive resistance, with he and his wife, about whom unfortunately we know very little, um, partaking in sit-downs on the street cars and the trolleys in the city,

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bringing the system to a halt while [[a sump foot]], shame-faced city administration and police department um, de-decided to do, what what wh-what to do with them.

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Um, eventually the, in the-the city's transportation was desegregated, um, in part to Catto's efforts.

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The main thing, though, was that Catto was involved in politics and I don't think it's it's -- I-I think that it's fair to say we underestimate how important politics was as an organizing concept to nineteenth century America.

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It-it-it took up a tremendous amount of their time, not only because it was politically important on issues alone, but it was culturally important as a way of organizing and mobilizing citizens for all kinds of activities centered around elections.

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Um, Catto as we've seen, had participated in the baseball leagues, but his main attention was creating a black infrastructure [[clears throat]] that would allow black participation in the political process.

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As I've said, he lobbied for the three great amendments, but he also was involved in local politics as they moved closer to 1871, the first election in which blacks--

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Philadelphia was a fairly tolerant city as I've indicated, but it had a large, white working-class population who felt its social position threatened by both free blacks and, earlier, by slaves and free blacks, and

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let's remember that in the 19th century th--the progressive party on civil rights was the ci-- was the Republican party.

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Repu-- Black citizens, newly enfranchised citizens, universally voted the Republican ticket.

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The white working class and the old conservatives, of whatever class, tended to vote Democratic on the element of States' rights and localism.

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The election in 1871 was incredibly heated and during it Catto received death threats.

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Politics was a rough-and-tumble business in which riots were the norm rather than the exception.

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We know at some point during that election season he'd bought a gun, because he had received threats, and

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just before the election in 18-- November 1871, he was accosted on the street while walking to a polling station by Franklin Kelly, a democratic operative and two of his associates.

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Some kind of a fray broke out-- we don't know whether it was a fight, we don't know whether it was a straight-out assassination,

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but in the case--in the course of this fight Catto was shot and killed, dying instantly on the spot.

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Kelly absconded, went south and hid out for 15 years, and the city of Philadelphia was in sh--was ashamed.

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Catto's-- Catto's passing, his murder, shocked the city's sensibilities. It shocked their notions of good intentions. It shocked their notions of propriety. And as well, it brought to the--it, it brought home to them, and especially to the black community, the perils of racism that

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you could do absolutely everything right, you could be an exemplary citizen, you could be

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the equivalent of the best connected, most well tied-in white citizen, doing exactly what a white man of his age would have--

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and nonetheless, because of your color of your skin,

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combined with your radicalism of your politics,

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a politics that only wanted in, that didn't want to destroy the system, but only wanted participation

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um, you could be gunned down because of that activism.

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And the city was ashamed. And, at its funeral--, at Octavius Catto's funeral--, the crowds were larger than when Lincoln's body had passed through in 1965.

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So we're left with the divided legacy of Octavius Catto,

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as the mart-- as the motto on this 'carte de visite' photo says, "One More Martyr in the Cause of Constitutional Liverty"--

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The notion that that cause will endure, but nonetheless the cynicism or the, or the, the the wry acknowledgment that it's one more martyr, that there had been many martyrs, and there'd be many more martyrs to come.

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Octavius Catto a forgotten member, in some senses, of the Civil Rights Movement

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has been reclaimed to that movement by inclusion here in the National Portrait Gallery,

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and we celebrate his life as we celebrate the lives of all who have worked to make this country more da-- democratic and freer.

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Thank you.