Horace Cayton

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Horace Cayton (1859-1940) was an American journalist and politician. The son of a slave and a white plantation owner's daughter who went to Seattle, Washington in the late 1800’s and published the Seattle Republican, a newspaper directed towards white and black readers. At one point this newspaper had the second largest circulation in the city.

Horace was born in 1859 on a plantation in Mississippi. After Emancipation, he and his family moved to a farm near Port Gibson, Mississippi. He graduated from Alcorn College in the early 1880’s.

He headed west, convinced that his education and will to succeed would help him reach his real potential, and ended up in Seattle where he worked as a political reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Horace found employment at the Seattle Standard, the city’s first newspaper for African Americans, until 1893 when it failed. He issued the first edition of the Seattle Republican in May 1894, seeking to appeal to both white and black people.

By 1896, he had married a young woman he had met in college. Susie Revels Cayton was the daughter of Hiram Revels, the first black person elected into the United States Senate. Susie became associate editor of the Seattle Republican.

The Republican Party attracted many black people and Horace was able to win an important position in the party. He was a recurrent delegate to the county and state nominating conventions, secretary of the party’s King County convention in 1902, and for many years a member of the Republican State Central Committee. In Seattle, between 1900 and 1910, the number of blacks had risen by almost 2,000 people causing white prejudice to grow. Politically Horace lost power and after 1910 he never sat on the Republican State Central Committee or attended a Republican convention again.

Horace became a victim of Seattle’s changing racial and political pattern. In 1917, the Seattle Republican went under after Horace published an article about a Southern lynching. He continued his career in publishing and issued Cayton’s Weekly from 1916 until 1921, but it was unsuccessful.

He lost his home on Capitol Hill and moved to an apartment house. Horace and his wife entered into activities of the ever-growing black community. They participated in many social and civic events. He continued his affiliation with the Republican Party through membership in the King County Colored Republican Club. Horace died in 1940 and was followed by Susie in 1943.

Horace's son, also Horace R. Cayton (1908-1970) became an educator, researcher, government official, newspaper columnist, and famous sociologist, notable for his anthropological work, Black Metropolis. He co-authored this text with St. Clair Drake. Answers.com says, "With the purpose of educating white America, the book further exposed and explained African American conduct, personality, and culture which emerged from the conditions imposed by the white world. Ultimately, Cayton and Drake concluded their book with a call for the government to work more aggressively to help African Americans achieve equality. Like his father, Cayton expressed an on-going concern for racial equality and civil rights, a theme to which he repeatedly returned in his regular column for the Pittsburgh Courier."[1]

[edit] Sources

• Horace Cayton, Long Old Road: An Autobiography (New York: Trident Press, 1965), 17-23.
• Esther Mumford, Seattle’s Black Victorians 1852-1901 (Seattle: Ananse Press, 1980), 86-91.
• Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 19-20.