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City Club of Cleveland - "In Tasting Freedom", Biddle and Dubin
City Club of Cleveland
 
 
 
Octavius Valentine Catto was a second baseman on Philadelphia's best black baseball team, a teacher at the city's finest black school, an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights, and an orator who shared the stage with Frederick Douglass. With his murder during an election-day race riot in 1871, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer-one who risked his life a century before the events that took place in Selma and Birmingham.

In Tasting Freedom Daniel Biddle (winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and Murray Dubin painstakingly chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader-a "free" black man whose freedom was in name only. Born in the American South, where slavery permeated everyday life, he moved north, where he joined the fight to be truly free-free to vote, go to school, ride on streetcars, play baseball, and even participate in Fourth of July celebrations.

Catto electrified a biracial audience in 1864 when he called on free men and women to act and to educate the newly freed slaves, proclaiming, "There must come a change." With a group of other African Americans who called themselves a "band of brothers," he challenged one injustice after another.

Tasting Freedom presents the little-known stories of Catto and the men and women who struggled to change America. This book will change your understanding of civil rights history.

Daniel R. Biddle is the Philadelphia Inquirer's Pennsylvania editor; he won a Pulitzer Prize and other national awards for his investigative stories on the courts. Murray Dubin, the author of South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner, was a reporter and editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 34 years, until 2005.

Reviews

"[A] marvelous historical feast for lovers of Afro-American, Philadelphia, and American history alike.... The book's particular magic is that it shows how real people, black and white, rich and poor, were tossed about in the historical currents that flowed through Philadelphia.... One would have to search far and wide to find a better-researched and more compellingly readable biography."
-The Philadelphia Inquirer

"This is a great story and a compelling history of the original civil rights movement-with its own Dr. King. In Tasting Freedom, Biddle and Dubin bring to light a hero whose footprints helped lead America through the challenges of racial injustice: Octavius Catto. The story is both riveting and elucidative"
-Juan Williams, author of Eyes on the Prize and Thurgood Marshall

"Tasting Freedom is required reading for anyone who thinks the civil rights movement started in the 1950s, with Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks (hint: you're off by a full century). This is a revelation for those of us who grew up being fed morality tales about righteous Northern free staters standing against Southern slaveholders (hint: neither offered real freedom). Biddle and Dubin's book is for all of us who love a story about baseball and war, about race and the making of America."
-Larry Tye, author of Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

"The book will be a revelation for those who thought the civil rights movement started in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and 1960s. It would serve well as a text and study guide for a high school or college course in social justice reformation issues in this country."
-Pennsylvania Magazine

The Karen Faith Witt and A.H. Weinstein Memorial Forum on the Persecution of Peoples.
February 25, 2011