[This Cover Story first appeared in the Schuylkill Valley Journal’s Fall 2017 issue.]
While sculptures all over our country are being moved, removed and, in some cases, abused, people in the City of Brotherly Love have come together to install a new statue. A recent addition to the bronze population of Philadelphia is a monument in the likeness of Octavius Catto. Of all the statues in the city, this (at long last) is the first to represent a specific named person of color. The dedication of a memorial to this man is not simply a case of affirmative action in public art. Catto, who lived from 1839 to 1871, was a teacher, orator, civil rights activist, community leader, and even a star baseball player. Octavius Catto accomplished all this in the short lifetime allotted him before he was killed by an assassin’s bullet at the age of 32. The recognition is well-deserved and long overdue.
At age 15, Catto was a student at the Institute for Colored Youth, a school on Lombard Street in Philadelphia. Five years later he was teaching math and English at that school. In 1861, Catto became the alumni association’s first president. His leadership extended to the local branch of the Equal Rights League, the first national organization established (in 1864) for the promotion of human rights, especially the right to vote which was denied people of color.
The quest for civil rights began long before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to cede her seat on a bus to a white rider in Alabama where blacks were expected to move to the back of a bus in deference to white riders who would sit toward the front. Nearly a century earlier, Octavius Catto helped write the bill of legislation to provide people of color access to Philadelphia street cars, a law that was passed in 1867. At that time, Philadelphia public mass transit consisted of privately owned horse-drawn streetcars. Many of the owners did not allow people of color on the streetcars at all. Some would occasionally condescend to permit a black person to pay to board. That person would be relegated not to the back of the car, but to the front platform, an exposed position on the car subject to spattering by dirt from the street as well as dirt from the horse.
Access to public transportation was necessary to give people an opportunity for jobs that required travel to a work site, a right basic to daily life and to earning a living in the city. In March of 1867, after many unsuccessful attempts, the bill Octavius Catto helped to write was passed to make it illegal to deny streetcar access to black passengers in Pennsylvania.
There were restrictions to overcome in terms of recreation as well. Catto led the struggle to have the baseball team he founded, the Pythians, compete against white ball clubs. The appeal to have the Pythians admitted to the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players was known to the delegates as “Catto’s proposal.” Unfortunately, the association refused.
On the other hand, the efforts of the Equal Rights League finally met with success in 1870 when Congress passed the fifteenth amendment to allow black men to vote. But legislation is only a step toward effecting social change. The 1871 mayoral election in Philadelphia pointed at the disparity between legislation and reality. There was major strife in our fair city at the time of the 1871 election. Local Democrats were resentful that their hold on the city might be broken by black voters who were likely to cast their ballots for the party of Abraham Lincoln – Republican. Rioting and violence erupted to discourage black voters from exercising their new right. National Guard troops were called upon to uphold the law. The Fifth Brigade, a black division of which Catto was a major, was among those called to duty. On his way to brigade headquarters, Octavius Catto was shot and killed for the cause he had fostered – martyred to that cause after its apparent success.
The idea for this memorial began more than a decade before the current controversy over statuary in the United States. This project was twelve years in the works. With the support of former Mayors John Street and Michael Nutter along with [then] current Mayor Jim Kenney, the Catto statue has finally taken its place. The memorial was dedicated in a ceremony at Philadelphia’s City Hall on September 26, 2017 before a large, enthusiastic crowd of citizens, including several of Catto’s descendants.
Sculptor Branly Cadet was chosen by a committee of artists to design and fashion the memorial to Octavius Catto. Earlier, Cadet had sculpted the twenty-one foot statue of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the first of New York’s African-American congressmen, that stands in front of the New York State Office Building. Another of Branly Cadet’s works is the Jackie Robinson statue at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
The Octavius Catto sculpture is at once grand and finely nuanced. The face of the statue shows both determination and dignity. The sculptural gesture is a total-body gesture, ambiguous with a dash of desperation, a smidgeon of supplication, a pinch of impatience, a flicker of frustration, and an ample amount of appeal to the humanity of humanity. You can almost hear Catto saying, “Why not simply respect one another? Is that really so difficult?”
About The Author
Mike Cohen hosts Poetry Aloud and Alive at Philadelphia's Big Blue Marble Book Store. His articles on sculpture appear in the Schuylkill Valley Journal in which he is a contributing editor. Mike has memorized a good deal of his poetry, having found that while some poems should be seen and not heard, others should be heard and not seen. It is a constant struggle to keep them sorted properly and to keep poems that should be neither seen nor heard out of the mix. Constant companion, cohabitant, cohort, and confidante, Connie, keeps Mike and his poems from getting off-kilter. Mike's wry writing has appeared in the Mad Poets Review, Fox Chase Review, and other journals. His poetic presentations feature humor and drama against a philosophical backdrop. Look for him at http://mikecohensays.com, on YouTube, and in his book, BETWEEN THE I'S as well as the forthcoming collection of poems and short tales, BETWEEN THE SHADOW AND THE WALL.
References
https://whyy.org/episodes/monuments-in-philadelphia/ - Marty Moss-Coane interview with DAN BIDDLE and MURRAY DUBIN, authors of Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America, and PAUL FARBER, artistic director of Monument Lab and Managing Director of the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities.
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/civil-rights-movement
http://www.ushistory.org/catto/chap8-analyze.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Equal_Rights_League