Octavius Catto

Octavius V. Catto
Octavius Catto, Year unknown
Born	(1839-02-22)February 22, 1839 Charleston, South Carolina, USA
Died	October 10, 1871(1871-10-10) (aged 32) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Movement	African-American Civil Rights Movement

Octavius Valentine Catto (February 22, 1839 – October 10, 1871) was a black educator, intellectual, and civil rights activist in Philadelphia. He became principal of male students at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he had also been educated. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, in a prominent mixed-race family, he moved north as a boy with his family. He became educated and served as a teacher, becoming active in civil rights. As a man, he also became known as a top cricket and baseball player in 19th-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Catto became a martyr to racism, as he was shot and killed in election-day violence in Philadelphia, where ethnic Irish of the Democratic Party, which was anti-Reconstruction and had opposed black suffrage, attacked black men to prevent their voting for Republican candidates.

Octavius Catto was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, as his mother was free: Sarah Isabella Cain was a member of the city's prominent mixed-race DeReef family, which had been free for decades and belonged to the Brown Fellowship Society as a mark of their status. . His father, William T. Catto, had been a slave millwright in South Carolina and gained his freedom. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister before taking his family north, first to Baltimore, and then to Philadelphia where they settled. Pennsylvania abolished slavery before the Revolutionary War ended. William T. Catto was a founding member of the Banneker Institute in that city and author of "A Semi-Centenary Discourse," a history of the First African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.