A 12-foot bronze statue of Octavius Valentine Catto stands at the southwest corner of Philadelphia City Hall. It is suitably larger than life. If you don’t already know who Catto was, educator and historian Amy Cohen is here to make sure you do.

Catto, one of Philadelphia’s earliest and most prominent Black educators and civil rights activists, features prominently in Episode 5 of the series “In Pursuit,” which extensively documents his rise and shows how his advocacy ultimately led to his martyrdom. It also sheds new light on Philadelphia’s role in the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Bible Riots and the rise of recently arrived Irish immigrants in the city — and their role in Catto’s death.

In the middle of the most contentious aspects of that history stands Catto, who in some ways represented everything many of Philadelphia’s white Irish-American citizens living in the city’s Moyamensing neighborhood despised.

“The Blacks coming up from the South were seen as economic competition, so there was that tension,” says historian and educator Amy Cohen, author of “Black History in the Philadelphia Landscape.”

“There was also the tension of being located side by side in what we would now call South Philadelphia,” she adds. “Furthermore, there was some tension because Philadelphia had this fairly long-established educated Black elite. So, for example, the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY) at 9th and Bainbridge. It was not far from Moyamensing, and you had well-dressed Black students going there, getting educated in Greek and Latin and physics. So there was some resentment among the Irish community, where they might be struggling at heavy labor jobs, seeing well-dressed Black folks in their midst.”

Philadelphia’s Black citizens exercised their newly enacted voting rights in support of the Republican Party, and that brought them — and Catto, who was by that time principal of male students at ICY — further into conflict with Irish Democrats, led in Moyamensing by Alderman William “Bull” McMullen.

For quite some time before the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, Octavius Catto had been blazing trails, fighting for racial equality. Catto had been at the forefront of streetcar desegregation, which had been passed by the Republican state legislature. During the Civil War, he had recruited a company of Black volunteers that he led to Harrisburg, only to have been turned back by Major General Darius Couch. Undaunted, he helped raise 11 regiments of United States Colored Troops.

Catto also laid the foundation for Negro League Baseball, launching the Pythian Base Ball Club together with his friend Jacob C. White, Jr., which unsuccessfully tried to integrate the National Baseball Association. “He didn’t see it as just a pastime,” Cohen explains. “He saw it as a path to more.”

Catto was a Renaissance man and political lightning rod. Rather than be celebrated for his brilliance, his leadership made him a target — literally — for those who sought to maintain political power in the city of Philadelphia.

It was on election day in 1871, a mayoral election year, that Catto was shot dead in the street by one of McMullen’s men, Frank Kelly. He was not the only Black person killed in Philadelphia that day, all part of an intimidation campaign designed to maintain Democratic control in the city. Philadelphia’s newly enfranchised Black men voted Republican — the party of Lincoln.

The largely Irish Democrats had a lot to lose. They had control over many of the city’s institutions, such as the police and fire departments.

“There was a Democratic mayor in office,” Cohen notes. “If he lost, a lot of Irish Americans who were loyal Democrats were going to lose their jobs and lose their political power. There’s a lot at stake. It’s a lot more than, ‘They’re Black and we don’t like them.’”

Of those Black people who were killed in Philadelphia on election day, Cohen says, Catto “is the only one who got an obituary in Harper’s and the New York Times and got a funeral procession through the city.”

Cohen first came to know about Catto in 2005, when Philadelphia became the first school district in the nation to require a year of Black history. “I was one of the original teachers of that course,” she says. “That’s when I first started to learn about Catto, because I always liked to do a lot of local history in my course. And then Dan Biddle and Murray Dubin wrote their book, ‘Tasting Freedom.’ So more people started to learn about Catto, but he was still a fairly obscure figure.”

Cohen raised Catto’s profile herself by producing a video documentary about him, “and then I would go out and screen it and lead a discussion. And my question was always, what issues would Catto be interested in today if he were suddenly alive? He was always an activist. What would his activism be about if he were around in the 21st century? And so, I talk about the need for Black educators. I talk about, and this has gotten a little less relevant, although it’s suddenly back in the conversation because Colin Kaepernick has written a memoir, but he would have definitely loved the whole athletes-as-activists vibe that was going on.”

Ironically, it was an Irish American, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, who played a role in bringing Catto’s statue to City Hall.

“The real genesis of that started when then-Councilman Jim Kenney read about Catto,” Cohen says. “And when he learned that [Catto’s] assassin, Frank Kelly, was Irish and Jim Kenney was born, raised and educated in Philadelphia and had never heard about Catto or Frank Kelly or the assassination, he really wanted more Philadelphians to know that story. He started working in cooperation with other people to have a statue outside City Hall. It was his Irishness that made him feel connected to the story.”

“Episode 5: America” will be screened Wednesday, Oct. 14, from 6-8:30 p.m. at the Commodore John Barry Arts and Cultural Center (the Irish Center), 6815 Emlen St., in Mount Airy.