Viewing page 1 of 6

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Transcription: [00:00:02]
Octavius Catto, 1839-1871 --

[00:00:07]
-- African American civil rights leader, early baseball organizer, and martyr to the cause of constitutional liberty.

[00:00:15]
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.

[00:00:24]
I would venture to guess that Octavius Catto is the least well-known of any of the people in our permanent collection.

[00:00:30]
We know the major figures of the civil rights movement of both the 19th and 20th century --

[00:00:35]
Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King -- but here we have Octavius Catto,

[00:00:41]
somebody who, in the words of a great historian, Edward Thompson, has been hidden from history.

[00:00:47]
And we've brought him back essentially to life, bringing his career, his personality, his achievements,

[00:00:54]
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.

[00:01:06]
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.

[00:01:25]
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.

[00:01:43]
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.

[00:01:59]
What we do know is that Octavius Catto ended up in Philadelphia probably as a [[result]]