In 2016, Charles Barkley marked Black History Month with a daily spotlight on local African-American heroes. Many of them didn’t make it into the history books or even the newspapers of their time. But their stories are inspiring and worth knowing. Here’s another look.
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Caroline LeCount
Teacher/Civil Rights Activist
Caroline LeCount
Teacher/Civil Rights Activist
(1846 - January 24, 1923)
A teacher in Frankford, LeCount was Philly’s Rosa Parks 100 years before the Montgomery bus boycott, defiantly riding street cars and filing petitions to have a law against black riders repealed.
With her fiancé Octavius Catto, she kept up the fight even after the law was changed: When a conductor refused to stop for her, LeCount—just 21 at the time—filed a complaint with the police, eventually forcing the driver to pay a $100 fine.
She also pushed for the rights of African-American teachers and students, standing up to the school board of the Wilmot Colored School to insist a black colleague become principal because “colored children should be taught by their own,” reports noted.
She herself later became only the second African-American female principal of a public school.
EDUCATION:
- The Institute of Colored Youth (now Cheyney University)
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
- Secretary of the Ladies’ Union Association, which sent aid to wounded black soldiers during the Civil War
- Ohio Street School teacher for 50 years
- One of the leaders in the successful fight to integrate horse-drawn streetcars
- Filed complaint that fined $100 to a conductor who didn’t allow her to board streetcar
- Noted orator
FINAL WORD:
“Henceforward,” an editorial said, after LeCount’s victory in court, “the wearied schoolteacher, returning from her arduous day’s labor, shall not be condemned to walk to her distant home through cold and heat and storm.”
Home page image: Reaching For Your Star © 2003 City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program / Don Gensler. Photo by Jack Ramsdale
Headshot courtesy of History Making Productions.
