A century before the civil rights protests in Selma and Birmingham, a 27-year-old African-American named Octavius Catto led the fight to desegregate Philadelphia's horse-drawn streetcars...
Throughout the (Civil) war, family members and friends were unable to visit black troops who were injured because they were not permitted to ride on streetcars....The campaign began quietly: People held meetings and wrote letters, but for Catto, Biddle says, that wasn't enough.
"While we can find very few instances of civil disobedience prior to that, somewhere Catto figured out that was the way to do it. And we believe what he did is organized pregnant women, he organized college students, to simply go on the street cars en masse," Biddle says.
Catto's early calls for acts of public defiance were almost unimaginable in that time...
Catto's murder sparked a public outcry, and his funeral was described as "the biggest public funeral in the city perhaps ever at that point, rivaling that of Civil War heroes," Biddle says. But today, for the most part, Octavius Catto is a forgotten hero.
"I'd love to tell you that Martin Luther King knew about Catto and that's why he did what he did, but I can't prove that," Biddle says. But it was the shoulders of Catto and dozens of other men and women "that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and Ralph Abernathy ... stood on top of."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130722484
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