Tasting Freedom, a book about Civil War-era equal rights activist Octavius Valentine Catto recently published by Temple University Press, was excerpted in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 12th, 13th and 14th. Authors and longtime Inquirer journalists, Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, chronicle the life of this charismatic black leader, a free black man whose freedom was in name only. He shared stages with Frederick Douglass, recruited black men for Lincoln’s armies, played for a pioneering black baseball team and fought for equality in the statehouse and the streets. Catto and his allies waged their battles for civil rights a century before Birmingham and Selma.