City's post-Civil War freedom riders

He shared stages with Frederick Douglass, recruited black men for Lincoln's armies, played for a pioneering black baseball team, and fought for equality in the statehouse and the streets. His name was Octavius Catto, and he and his allies waged their battles for civil rights a century before Birmingham and Selma.

In their new book "Tasting Freedom," longtime Inquirer journalists Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin chronicle the life of this charismatic Philadelphia leader and the movement he helped lead.

In this excerpt, the Civil War has ended, and as part of new demands for equality and access, Catto has targeted the city's segregated, horse-drawn streetcars.

Their speeches rang with names of battles where black soldiers had died for the Union. Their petitions swelled with testimony from wives and mothers brutalized for trying to ride streetcars to visit loved ones in Army hospitals.

But the drive by black activists and their white allies to integrate those horse-drawn cars had been sabotaged and stalled in Harrisburg in 1865.

So their fledgling group, the Equal Rights League, sent a new colored lobbyist from Philadelphia to climb the Capitol's marble steps. He was a teacher and orator, well-versed in Tennyson and Tocqueville and blessed with his minister father's talents for persistence and persuasion. Those talents also helped explain how young Octavius Catto had attained something unimaginable for a Southern-born Negro in Civil War America: an education.

In 1866, the Equal Rights League's Car Committee - Catto and two older men, William Forten and David Bowser - revised the streetcar bill. Their draft went further, awarding damages of $500 per passenger against any streetcar company or employee that barred passengers "on account of color, or race, or who shall refuse to carry such person . . . or who shall throw any car, or cars, from the track, thereby preventing persons from riding." Violators would be fined $100 to $500, or jailed for up to 90 days.

State Sen. Morrow Lowry, the league's white friend from Erie, accepted this draft and promised that this session of the state legislature would be different from the last.

The timing seemed right. In Washington, Thaddeus Stevens and other Radical Republicans were poised to pass the 14th Amendment over President Andrew Johnson's veto. The amendment granted citizenship and equality before the law and was the last stepping-stone before giving colored men the vote.

In their offices in Philadelphia, on Liberty Hall's third floor, Catto and the league's other board members were like telegraphers, sending and receiving messages about two causes that fueled each other - the battles for the streetcars and the ballot.

A message went out to state legislators from the car committee: Support our bill, and we will support you. Men elected from the rich alluvial farm basins and rolling Alleghenies needed convincing that a vote for the Negroes' bill would someday win them Negro votes back home.

The bill advanced in fits and starts. Catto, Forten, and Bowser reported to the league's next convention, in Pittsburgh, that their efforts had been stymied by a turncoat Philadelphia senator "who pretended to be [a] friend of the bill."

Some supporters said it was time to stop devoting energy to a cause so heroic and hopeless. The Rev. Stephen Smith - a colored leader since before Catto was born - professed "an entire lack of confidence" that enough white minds could be changed.

White allies flinched, too. In fall 1866, Henry Peterson, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, told fellow Anti-Slavery Society members in Philadelphia that "even an army of occupation" could not integrate the cars.

At that same meeting, Lucretia Mott spoke up.

No one needed to be reminded that she had been at the barricades for half a century. She had defied a mayor's warning against "unnecessary walking" with Negro men; she had defied a mob that vowed to put the match to her house; and now she defied the pragmatism of her allies. Mott exhorted the group to keep agitating as the streetcar bill moved through the statehouse.

"The hour has come to demand it now!" she said.

The streetcar protests became rhythmic: Defy the rule. Tell the newspapers. Speak at the meetings. Go to court.

Men and women - even pregnant women - intermingled with white throngs and made their way to seats in cars before conductors noticed. "They made organized effort to appear on every car that was on the street," a white eyewitness wrote. "They could not be excluded, as the cars were compelled to stop because white passengers were waiting." Another writer said confrontations on the cars "are almost of daily occurrence."

Two colored women, one from Baltimore and one "very distinguished lady" from Philadelphia, entered a Spruce-Pine Street car and paid their fares. When the conductor saw them, he ordered them "to quit the car, but [they] declined doing so," a newspaper reported.

"The car was then driven off at a furious rate." When the two women tried to get out, they were told they were being taken away to be "whitewashed."

Tactics risking injury and imprisonment did not lend themselves to broadsides or other public declarations. Perhaps the closest anyone came to such a declaration was a speech delivered on a summer night in 1866. A colored audience had gathered to decry the "shameful" streetcar ejections of four women. The main speaker was Catto. The meeting was on June 21, 1866, at Sansom Street Hall.

He was 27 now, part educator and part agitator, possessing the elements his teachers, Charles Reason and Ebenezer Bassett, had compounded in the classrooms of the Institute for Colored Youth. Like his father, he threw himself into many causes and committees. The night before, he had been at his weekly St. Thomas vestry meeting. On the following Tuesday, he would return to Liberty Hall on Lombard Street to take minutes at the national Equal Rights League board meeting.

He moved about from one end of the state to the other on behalf of the league, typically accompanied by any number of his "band of brothers": Jacob White Jr., Robert Adger, William Minton, Alfred Green, Bowser, Forten. And in their leisure time, they were starting a local Negro baseball team. You can guess who was captain.

In Sansom Street Hall, he methodically drew together the threads of the car campaign. He called for bodily defiance of the streetcar rule. In another time, that defiance would be described as civil disobedience.

"He recommended the gentlemen to vindicate their manhood," a newspaper reported, "and no longer suffer defenseless women and children to be assaulted or insulted with impunity by ruffianly conductors and drivers."

He condemned the companies for ejecting soldiers' loved ones and "delicate women," the Victorian way of saying "pregnant." He offered resolutions - "That we earnestly and unitedly protest against the proscription which excludes us from the city cars, as an outrage against the enlightened civilization of the age."

By the end of the year, a few legislators who had opposed the old streetcar bill were coming around for the new one. In Washington, Congress was on the brink of granting votes to Negroes in the reconstructed South. Everyone saw that it was only a matter of time before Negroes would vote in Scranton and Altoona. The Democrats' newspaper, the Age, warned that black voters would turn Philadelphia into the next Haiti.

A colored writer contemplated the moment.

"True, reforms move slowly, and it will require time and patience for the people who have been cradled in oppression and prejudice to become educated out of their false views. But there is no mistaking the fact that there is a better feeling and understanding existing between the white and colored people of this country than ever before."

In Harrisburg on Feb. 5, 1867, Lowry formally introduced the tougher bill drafted by the league's car committee. "The prospects for its passage are cheering," Catto, Bowser, and Forten reported to the league. "It will be brought up at the earliest possible moment. . . . [We] are sanguine that the governor will sign it without hesitancy."

But one more battle had to be fought, in the middle of the night: Democrats attempted once again to poison the bill with parliamentary maneuvers. Finally, the Republican majority forced a call of the roll - and by a party-line vote of 50 to 27, the streetcars of Pennsylvania were opened to passengers of color.

Saturday's Philadelphia Press reported that Republican Gov. John W. Geary signed the bill on Friday, March 22. All that remained was to test the law in the streets.

This was no routine matter. Men as old as Robert Purvis and William Whipper remembered when a previous state law had granted them the vote but gave no shield against white fists at the polls. Someone respectable should test the law. Better a minister or teacher than a washer or a maid. Someone to stand straight in a rain of words or blows.

On the first Monday of spring, young women in Philadelphia were trying new styles - straw bonnets, chintzes, plaid silks from India, and new hoopskirts, only three yards 'round and more flexible, suited to modern times, to sitting at a teacher's desk or riding a crowded car.

Under a cloudless noontime sky, the Ohio School's young colored principal and her colored assistant walked to Eleventh and Lombard Streets, where the Tenth and Eleventh Street Railway ran. The assistant, Alice Gordon, stood by as the principal, Caroline Le Count, flagged down the yellow car and caught the attention of the conductor.

His name was Edwin F. Thompson, and he looked right back at Le Count. He "sneered at her," as a newspaper put it, and kept the car moving. He uttered the same words heard by colored soldiers and their loved ones: "We don't allow niggers to ride!"

Just a month past her 21st birthday, Le Count was prepared. The young educator, seen lately in Catto's company, promptly filed a complaint. In court, she held up a copy of the Press with the news that the governor had signed the law.

I know nothing of a new law, the magistrate said, and I do not trust that paper.

Le Count promptly obtained a certified copy of the law. Thompson and his company paid a $100 fine.

A letter from Harrisburg was read out loud at a meeting in Liberty Hall.

The letter was from Lowry and 14 other legislators who had supported the car bill. "We have found you here every week from [the bill's] presentation to its final passage, earnestly and persistently working for it," the legislators wrote. "This bill is essentially your own."

The Press reprinted the letter on the same page as news of the law's first test, a complaint filed by "a mulatto woman named Caroline R. Le Count." An editorial said her case showed that the law would be "vigorously enforced."

At the victory meeting, resolutions of thanks were voted for the three lobbyists. They had trundled off a year earlier to lay siege to the state capital with no more ammunition than a stack of Equal Rights League pamphlets and an argument that in Harrisburg, in Washington, in America, the time was right. Now they'd come home victors.

The meeting also voted a resolution of gratitude to Lucretia Mott. Then, one by one, Forten, Bowser, and Catto stood, and cheers went up.

Commentators agreed on the reasons for this victory: Certain legislators had been convinced that the only way to win Negro votes in the future was to pass a bill in the present. The league's trio, the artistic Bowser, the persnickety Forten, and the "rising" Catto, were credited with the final bit of convincing. Benjamin Hunt concluded that "love to the Lord and the neighbor" did less to change legislators' minds than "the near approach of Negro suffrage in the State."

Now the victors could wonder: What might they achieve with the vote? Would all the outrages begin to fade away, as the league had once predicted, to "disappear as the dews of morning before the morning sun"?

As the huzzahs for Catto, Forten, Bowser, and Mott shook the chandeliers of Liberty Hall, that day drew nearer.

Monday: Battles on the Ball Field

Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America is available for purchase at localbookstores or on the Web at www.temple.edu/tempress and through other online retailers.

More on the book, including photos, a video, thumbnail bios, and book-related events, is at tastingfreedombook.com