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.