Octavius Catto
Octavius Valentine Catto was a black educator, intellectual, and civil rights activist in Philadelphia. He became principal of male students at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he had also been educated. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, in a prominent mixedrace family, he moved north as a boy with his family. He became educated and served as a teacher, becoming active in civil rights. As a man, he also became known as a top cricket and baseball player in 19thcentury Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Octavius Catto was born free in Charleston, South Carolina, as his mother was free Sarah Isabella Cain was a member of the citys prominent mixedrace DeReef family, which had been free for decades and belonged to the Brown Fellowship Society as a mark of their status. . His father, William T. Catto, had been a slave millwright in South Carolina and gained his freedom. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister before taking his family north, first to Baltimore, and then to Philadelphia where they settled. Pennsylvania abolished slavery before the Revolutionary War ended. William T. Catto was a founding member of the Banneker Institute in that city and author of A SemiCentenary Discourse, a history of the First African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia.
Source: Wikipedia