How a voting rights pioneer also orchestrated the first recorded interracial baseball game

Octavius Catto’s accomplishments in baseball make up just a sliver of his incredible life.

“The Martin Luther King Jr. of the 19th century” was a hero in Philadelphia.

Along with Frederick Douglass, in the face of generals who disavowed it, he organized regiments of Black soldiers to fight in the Civil War. He was a leading voice in making sure his Black brethren got to the polls safely and securely when they finally received the right to vote in 1869. He was instrumental in getting Pennsylvania to pass a law stating there could be no segregation on transit systems anywhere in the state. From the New York Times:

Last evening a colored man got into a Pine-street passenger car, and refused all entreaties to leave the car, where his presence appeared to be not desired.

The conductor of the car, fearful of being fined for ejecting him, as was done by the Judges of one of our courts in a similar case, ran the car off the track, detached the horses, and left the colored man to occupy the car all by himself.

The colored man still firmly maintains his position in the car, having spent the whole of the night there.

And baseball, as it has throughout its time in America, proved to be another environment where Catto could make progress in his fight for civil rights. He was a co-founder of and star infielder for the Pythian Base Ball Club. The all-Black team was one of the best squads in the nation, putting up an undefeated season in 1868. But Catto wanted to play an all-white team, seeing it as a vehicle through which to culturally assimilate into society. White teams mostly refused to play a team of all Blacks, because they didn’t want the embarrassment of losing to them.

But finally, on Sept. 3, 1869, the Olympic Club – one of America’s oldest teams – agreed to take on the Pythians at the Jefferson Street Grounds in Philadelphia.

In front of a huge crowd of 5,000 people nearly bursting through the field’s ropes, a number only surpassed by the Olympic’s game against the professional Cincinnati Red Stockings, the very first recorded game between Blacks and whites occurred. The Olympic Club won the game, 44-23, but history was made. Subsequent interracial games popped up all over the Northeast, from Boston to Washington D.C. The much more organized Negro Leagues were formed in 1920. Another star infielder, Jackie Robinson, broke the MLB color line in 1947 with the Dodgers.

Sadly, Catto was gunned down a few years later in 1871 while attempting to vote, and trying to protect the rights of his fellow Black men to do the same, in Philadelphia’s mayoral election. He was only 32 years old.

Tens of thousands of Blacks and whites were outraged by his death, forming a funeral line more than three miles long. Nearly a century and a half later, the city erected a statue of Catto at City Hall – the first of a Black person in all of Philadelphia. It was a life cut down far too early and tragically, but still, almost impossibly, full of such enormous accomplishment.

W.E.B. Du Bois would later write about the day of Catto’s memorial service: “And so closed the career of a man of splendid equipment, rare force of character, whose life was so interwoven with all that was good about us, as to make it stand out in bold relief, as a pattern for those who have followed after.”

Credit to SABR for help researching this story