Pennsylvania State Archives [RG-13, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, WPA, Octavius Catto]

Even in the North and with a growing black population, political activism on the part of African Americans was dangerous, as the life of Octavius Valentine Catto (1840-1871) attests. He was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of a Presbyterian minister who took his family to Philadelphia. Catto received an excellent education and was a scholar, an athlete, and an activist who founded the Banneker Literary Institute and the Equal Rights League in 1864. During the Civil War, he raised a regiment for the Union and, with Frederick Douglass, recruited young black men for the army. Catto belonged to several civic, cultural, and political groups, and was a prominent civil rights leader in Philadelphia. On October 10, 1871, he was shot in the back as a riot led by a white mob erupted during local elections. Catto and several other black men were killed in the riot. His murder galvanized Philadelphia's African-American community in its struggle for equal rights, but it was also a reminder of the risks that black political activists faced throughout the country.