The Dixie Hummingbirds

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017

On these North Philadelphia grounds, active from 1864 to 1891, Americans watched baseball grow up. In 1869 the Black activist and educator Octavius Catto led his Pythian club against the white Olympics in what is remembered as the first interracial baseball game, a quiet act of defiance in a segregated city. Seven years later the site hosted the first National League game, marking the sport's leap from amateur pastime to organized professional business.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Stephen Girard's 1831 will founded a school for poor white orphan boys, and for more than a century that racial restriction stood. Beginning in the 1930s, attorney Raymond Pace Alexander challenged it, and lawyer Cecil B. Moore later carried the fight into the federal courts. A 1968 ruling finally opened Girard College to students of all races, making its walls a landmark of the modern civil rights struggle.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

Founded in 1899 by Rev. Matthew Anderson, pastor of Berean Presbyterian Church, the Berean Institute set out to teach Black Philadelphians skilled trades that segregation and prejudice had closed off to them elsewhere. Anderson also launched the Berean Savings Association, weaving education together with Black economic self-reliance. Over time the school broadened its curriculum to meet the changing needs of its students.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1990

In 1964, in the unlikely setting of an abandoned Philadelphia jailhouse, Rev. Leon H. Sullivan opened the first Opportunities Industrialization Center to train Black workers for skilled jobs that discrimination had long kept beyond their reach. Born of the same organizing energy as Sullivan's earlier 'selective patronage' boycotts, O.I.C. paired vocational instruction with dignity and self-reliance, and the model spread from this city to hundreds of centers across the nation and eventually overseas.