Octavius Valentine Catto was an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on Philadelphia’s best black baseball team, a teacher at the city’s finest black school and an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. With his racially-charged murder, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer-one who risked his life a century before Selma and Birmingham.
In Tasting Freedom Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle painstakingly chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader-a “free” black whose freedom was in name only. Born in the American south, where slavery permeated everyday life, he moved north where he joined the fight to be truly free-free to vote, go to school, ride on streetcars, play baseball and even participate in July 4th celebrations.
Catto electrified a biracial audience in 1864 when he proclaimed, “There must come a change,” calling on free men and women to act and educate the newly freed slaves. With a group of other African Americans who called themselves a “band of brothers,” they challenged one injustice after another. Tasting Freedom presents the little-known stories of Catto and the men and women who struggled to change America.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Introduction “A Hundred O. V. Cattos”
1. Charleston
2. Arm in Arm
3. “Keep the Flame Burning . . .”
4. With Giants
5. Lessons
6. The Irish, the Killers, and Squire McMullen
7. “Arise, Young North”
8. How Much I Yearn to Be a Man”
9. A Chance on the Pavement
10. The Wolf Killers
11. Manhood
12. The Battle for the Streetcars
13. Baseball
14. The Hide of the Rhinoceros
15. Election Day
16. The Venus of the High Trapeze
Epilogue The Legacy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author :
Daniel R. Biddle, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Pennsylvania editor, has worked in nearly every phase of newspaper reporting and editing. His investigative stories on the courts won a Pulitzer Prize and other national awards. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Murray Dubin, author of South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner, was a reporter and editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer for 34 years before leaving the newspaper in 2005.
Note: In 2017 the city of Philadelphia will erect its first monument in honor of Octavius Catto.
Review :
"Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin have brought to life a leader of the Civil War-era struggle against slavery and for equal rights for blacks. This dramatic book not only rescues the intrepid Octavius Catto from obscurity but reminds us that this struggle-and the violent opposition to it-long predated the modern civil rights era."-Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University
"[A] marvelous historical feast for lovers of Afro-American, Philadelphia, and American history alike.... The book's particular magic is that it shows how real people, black and white, rich and poor, were tossed about in the historical currents that flowed through Philadelphia.... One would have to search far and wide to find a better-researched and more compellingly readable biography."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer
"This is a great story and a compelling history of the original civil rights movement-with its own Dr. King. In Tasting Freedom, Biddle and Dubin bring to light a hero whose footprints helped lead America through the challenges of racial injustice: Octavius Catto. The story is both riveting and elucidative"
-Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize and Thurgood Marshall
"Tasting Freedom is masterfully researched and cogently written. Biddle and Dubin transport us to yesteryear, profiling some of the central figures of the Civil War era and revealing the birth and rise of the black intelligentsia in this country. Tasting Freedom is a valuable triumph-and a work of importance."
-Elijah Anderson, Yale University
"Tasting Freedom is required reading for anyone who thinks the civil rights movement started in the 1950s, with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks (hint: you're off by a full century). This is a revelation for those of us who grew up being fed morality tales about righteous Northern free staters standing against Southern slaveholders (hint: neither offered real freedom). Biddle and Dubin’s book is for all of us who love a story about baseball and war, about race and the making of America."
-Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend
"If you fancy knowing about growing up black in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, there is no better place to start than with Biddle and Dubin's powerful and poignant biography of Octavius V. Catto. For those who believe that post–Civil War Reconstruction was only a Southern affair, this book is an eye-opener."
-Gary B. Nash, Director of the National Center for History in the Schools, UCLA, and author of The Liberty Bell
"An entrancing portrait of a leading Renaissance man for equal rights. . . . Nothing matches it at the moment as a prequel to Thomas J. Sugrue’s much-noted Sweet Land of Liberty."
-Library Journal
"This rich biography...restores Catto to his important place in the pantheon of civil rights heroes."
-ForeWord
