Octavius Valentine Catto was an American educator, intellectual, and civil rights activist. He became principal of male students at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he had also been educated. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, in a prominent mixed-race family, he moved north as a boy with his family. After completing his education, he went into teaching, and becoming active in civil rights. He also became known as a top cricket and baseball player in 19th-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A Republican, he was shot and killed in election-day violence in Philadelphia, where ethnic Irish of the Democratic Party, who were anti-Reconstruction and had opposed black suffrage, attacked black men to prevent their voting.

The Institute for Colored Youth was founded in 1837 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It became the first college for African-Americans in the United States, although there were schools that admitted African Americans preceding it. At the time, public policy and certain statutory provisions prohibited the education of blacks in various parts of the nation and slavery was entrenched across the south. It was followed by two other black institutions— Lincoln University in Pennsylvania (1854), and Wilberforce University in Ohio (1856). The second site of the Institute for Colored Youth at Ninth and Bainbridge Streets in Philadelphia was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. It is also known as the Samuel J. Randall School. A three-story, three-bay brick building was built for it in 1865, in the Italianate-style After moving to Cheyney, Pennsylvania in Delaware County, Pennsylvania its name was changed to Cheyney University.