POEM · CIVIC MEMORY
Philadelphia was beginning its new house of government when Frank Kelly shot Octavius Catto three times at Ninth and South. He was thirty-two. It was October 10, 1871, the city’s first major election after the Fifteenth Amendment. Black men were being beaten from the polls. Accounts disagree whether Catto had already voted or was still on his way. For thirty years the building rose. An all-white jury acquitted Kelly. The city raised Penn over the clock, the charter in his left hand, 548 feet above the street. Inside the north portal, Suffrage stood finished in stone. It took Philadelphia 146 years to set Catto at Penn Square. He stands twelve feet high, both palms open, one foot lifted toward a stainless-steel ballot box. The city preserved the distance exactly.