IT DIDN'T START WITH ROSA:

Civil rights, deep roots: Nineteenth-century American history is rich with the names of black leaders who fought hard and achieved much. (Murray Dubin and Daniel R. Biddle, 2/20/11, Philadelphia Inquirer)

[A]long with commemorating the courage of Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson, should we not learn as well about the courage of Caroline Le Count and Octavius Catto?

Who?

All of 21 years of age, Carrie Le Count was Philadelphia's second female school principal of color in 1867 when she boldly tested a new state law desegregating the city's horse-drawn streetcars. A white conductor shouted America's favorite racial epithet at her, ignored the new law, and drove off. But the young woman was not to be denied. She went to court with a copy of the law. The streetcar company and its conductor were fined $100.

Catto and his allies had drafted the new law in 1866, agitated for it, had it introduced in the legislature, and saw it passed. It was the first legislation in Pennsylvania written by black men. All the more impressive was that their bill became law at a time when black men could not vote in Pennsylvania. The Fifteenth Amendment did not extend that right to them until 1870.

That was not Catto's only feat of historic importance. The second baseman and captain of the Pythians, Philadelphia's best black baseball club, Catto and his team sought to break the color line in the infancy of major league baseball - in 1867, eight decades before Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Organized baseball turned the Pythians away, but the team and its captain persisted, and on Sept. 3, 1869, played an exhibition game in Philadelphia against the white Olympics. The Pythians lost - but a front-page story in the New York Times pronounced it the first game played between black and white teams. Two weeks later, the Pythians beat another white team.

The leaders of that 19th-century civil-rights movement resided across the North:

Henry Highland Garnet, the first black clergyman to address Congress, lived in New York City.

Martin Delany, a physician, explorer, journalist, and author, hailed from Pittsburgh.

John Rock, New Jersey-born, lived in Boston and became the first African American lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court.

The abolitionist brothers Langston, Charles, and John Mercer came from Ohio. John was dean of Howard Law School, U.S. minister to Haiti, and the first black person elected to Congress from Virginia.

Like the modern heroes of Birmingham and Selma, they endured beatings and burnings and went back for more.