Octavius Catto was one of the only Black members of Philadelphia's premier scientific organization, the Franklin Institute; principal of the city's foremost school for African Americans, the Institute for Colored Youth; and founder of the Pythians, the baseball team that went undefeated in the Negro league and ultimately crossed "the color line" to play against white teams nearly 50 years before Jackie Robinson was born. Catto was also a civic leader, who helped form a Civil War recruitment committee to sign African Americans up to fight for emancipation, and became a major in the Union army. He helped desegregate Philadelphia's streetcar system (resegregated 25 years after his death by "Plessy v. Ferguson") and advocated for the right to vote through the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. He was murdered in 1871 on the way home from voting. Studying the nineteenth-century educator and civil rights leader Octavius Catto can help students move beyond the simplistic U.S. narrative of racial progress to a more complex understanding of race and resistance in America. Research shows that U.S. history curricula and teachers consistently reduce the topic of racism in America to a simplistic narrative of racial progress: "Things were bad, but they got better." The resonance between Catto and Martin Luther King, Jr. disputes the idea that U.S. history is a relatively straightforward march towards equality. King's fight for what Catto had already won highlights the way racial equality regressed between Catto's and King's lifetimes.