Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Long before Rosa Parks, Octavius Valentine Cato refused to leave his seat on a segregated Philly

trolley. Cato's a lesser-known, but no less important part of the American story.

He was born in 1839 in South Carolina to a free woman of mixed race from the prominent

DeReefe family. His father was a freed slave and Presbyterian minister.

Cato's education began in segregated schools in Philadelphia, and he eventually attended

the nation's first black college and became a

teacher. Kato argued against the common practice of appointing, quote, incompetent or racist white

teachers to black schools. He raised awareness of the difficulties that even highly qualified

black teachers faced in finding jobs. Eventually, he would join the National Equal Rights League,

agitating for the abolition of slavery, and for voting rights for blacks, a cause that would

eventually lead to his murder. During the Civil War, Caddo became involved in the inner circles

of the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. He realized that black contributions to the war effort could build

support for equal rights, so he raised a volunteer regiment of black soldiers. But the army rejected

them. Eventually, the Secretary of War Edward Stanton would overrule the army, allowing Cato and his

friend Frederick Douglass to form 11 black regiments from the Philadelphia area.

Cato's troops trained in areas where trolleys refused to carry black passengers.

On May the 17th, 1865, the New York Times reported on the following incident.

Quote, last evening, a colored man got into a Pine Street passenger car and refused

all entreaties to leave the car, where his presence appeared to not be desired. The conductor of the car

ran the car off the track, detached the horses, and left the colored man to occupy the car all by

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