Jefferson Street Ballparks: First Interracial Game and First National League Game

Two baseball firsts happened on this North Philadelphia block. In eighteen sixty-nine, early civil rights activist Octavius Catto captained the all-Black Pythians against the white Olympic ball club here, making it the first recorded interracial baseball game in American history. Seven years later, in eighteen seventy-six, the first game in National League history was played at the same address.

Between eighteen sixty-four and eighteen ninety-one, these grounds hosted the sport's transformation from an amateur gentleman's pastime into a fiercely competitive professional business. Catto himself was assassinated in Philadelphia in eighteen seventy-one, a reminder of how dangerous the push for racial equality was even in the North. The games played here were a small but real step toward a more open game.