Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America by Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin (review)

Well before Rosa Parks decided she would not give up her place on a bus, the black men and women of Civil War-era Philadelphia fought for their place on streetcars. Journalists Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin tell the story of these men and women as part of a broader examination of the civil rights struggle of African Americans in Philadelphia before, during, and after the Civil War. They do so through the lens of one man's life, and death, that of Octavius Catto—principal of an all-black school, orator, and talented baseball player. Despite his short life (he was murdered in 1871 at the age of thirty-two), he was an important civil rights figure. That few Americans today remember him or the other African Americans in this early struggle for equality is one reason the authors wrote this book: they wanted everyone to understand that "the civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century was the second or third organized effort by African Americans to be treated as the equals of white persons. This book is about the first civil rights movement" (1). The authors are journalists, not historians, and do not pretend to engage any particular scholarly debate; rather, they wrote this book to remind Philadelphians about a forgotten aspect of their city's history.

To tell this story, the authors cross a number of traditional boundaries of time and space that delineate historical studies, because they want to show that the free states were not always totally free and that the slave states included free black men and women. Moreover, like the geographical border between slavery and freedom, the temporal boundaries that divide the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods are not as relevant as one might think when discussing the African American struggle for freedom. Prewar antislavery agitation and postwar efforts to define freedom exist as different points on the same line within the broader context of the first civil rights movement. In that spirit, the book begins in Charleston; Catto's friends and family lived in that precarious place occupied by free black Americans in the South before the Civil War. Even under these less than ideal circumstances, Catto's family and their community struggle to create a larger space for free black men and women within a slave society. Eventually, his family went north to Philadelphia, where they joined a vibrant community working with its white allies in the antislavery movement—while creating a number of all-black organizations, including the Institute for Colored Youth. Catto served as principal of this pioneering black high school. In addition to creating important African American institutions, he and his cohorts struggled to break the color line, with mixed results. They succeeded in integrating the streetcars but failed in their attempt to integrate local baseball leagues. The authors also describe the virulent racism of white Philadelphians, particularly Irish immigrants, who used mob violence to oppose their efforts, exacerbating these struggles. Ultimately, this type of violence led to Catto's untimely death on Election Day 1871.

While the book's title suggests that it is about Octavius Catto's life, its subject is actually the broader civil rights movement in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. One of the first chapters describes the antislavery movement in Philadelphia in the late 1830s and 1840s and details the violent opposition to abolitionism and abolitionists; Catto was a child during this era and played no role in this particular movement. In fact, much of the antebellum period description is of the activities of other prominent black and white civil rights leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Lucretia Mott. This approach is understandable, given the paucity of sources on African Americans like Catto and his family, who may have been relatively well-known in their time but did not leave enough...