Horace R. Cayton Papers

Biographical Note

Sociologist, writer and academician Horace Roscoe Cayton was born in Seattle on April 12, 1903 to Horace Cayton, Sr. and Susie Revels Cayton. Horace Cayton, Sr. was a prominent newspaper publisher, editor and writer, and Susie Revels Cayton was a teacher, writer and daughter of Mississippian Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African American senator in the United States. Horace Cayton, Sr. was born in Mississippi, the son of a white plantation owner’s daughter and a slave, and journeyed west to Seattle as an adult, hoping that his degree from Alcorn College (later Alcorn State University) would fare better in a more racially tolerant climate. After working for several newspapers in the city, Cayton founded his own, the Seattle Republican , in May 1894. In 1896, he married Susie Revels, who had moved from Mississippi to Seattle.

The Caytons lived a fairly prosperous and prominent life in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, a middle-class white community. However, Horace Cayton, Sr.’s outspoken articles in his newspaper, specifically in regards to racism and racial violence in the South and discrimination in Seattle, led to its demise in 1916. After this, the Caytons struggled financially. By this time their family had grown to include five children, their eldest, Ruth, born in 1897, Madge born in 1901, Horace born in 1903, Revels born in 1907 and their youngest, Lillie, born in 1914. Horace Cayton, Sr. and Susie Revels Cayton instilled within their children the legacy of their heritage as descendants of Hiram Revels and as members of a prominent African American family in Seattle. The expectations placed upon the trajectories of the Cayton children’s lives were great indeed.

Horace Cayton began to act out as a result of his family’s hardships and was arrested as a teenager for driving the getaway car in a gas station robbery. He was then was sent to reform school. Horace left home in 1919 and worked several laborer jobs including longshoreman, sailor, cook, railroad employee, cab driver and gold field worker before returning to Seattle, where he finished high school at a Young Men’s Christian Association preparatory school. In 1925, Cayton began attending college at the University of Washington, where he majored in economics and sociology. Interested in making sense of racism and human social relations, Cayton sought to pursue these interests academically and professionally. While in school, Cayton worked for the local sheriff as a deputy in order to support himself. It was during this time that he met and a married a fellow student, a white social worker named Bonnie Branch, in 1929.

In 1931, Cayton finished his schooling at the University of Washington and received his bachelor of arts degree. He then went to Chicago to do graduate work at the University of Chicago. Bonnie stayed behind at first and later joined him in Chicago. While he completed the coursework for his degree, Cayton never completed a dissertation. In order to support himself, Cayton worked in the sociology program as a research assistant. In 1934 and 1935, Cayton worked as a special assistant to Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes in New York City. He was charged with understanding how New Deal policies affected African Americans, especially African American labor. The result of Cayton’s research was a book, Black Workers and the New Unions , which he co-authored with George S. Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina. During this same period, Cayton began writing a regular column for the Pittsburgh Courier that blended his interests in civil rights, social justice and race relations in America.

While Cayton was beginning to make a name for himself in the field of sociology, his personal life was unraveling. He developed problems with drug and alcohol abuse. In addition to those problems, infidelity and the separations from his wife, Bonnie, during this period severely strained the couple’s marriage and ultimately led to their divorce. In 1935 and 1936, Cayton took a position teaching economics at Fisk University. It was there that he met and married one of his students, Irma Jackson, in November 1935. The two would marry and divorce and marry and divorce again over the course of their nine-year relationship.

In 1936, Cayton returned to Chicago to work on a Works Progress Administration project. The project was charged with studying the structure of the African American family and juvenile delinquency for three years, until 1939. St. Clair Drake, an anthropology instructor at the University of Chicago, joined the project. In 1941, funding from the Julius Rosenwald Fund enabled Drake and Cayton to organize their findings from the WPA project and supplement it with additional findings from the early 1940s. The result was one of the most seminal works on the life and culture of African Americans in Chicago— Black Metropolis (1945) .

By 1940, Horace Cayton became director of the Parkway Community House, formerly the Community Center of the Church of the Good Shepherd. Parkway served as a community gathering place, theater, art gallery and social work center. The center became one of the key institutions of the Chicago Renaissance. At Parkway, Cayton would develop friendships with writers such as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright. During this period Cayton wrote an influential weekly column for the Pittsburgh Courier . In 1947, Cayton married his third wife, Ruby Wright, but the marriage ended in divorce in 1949. Cayton sought the help of a psychiatrist to cope with his own issues regarding his upbringing and frustrations with racism, feelings of loneliness and hatred towards whites. His psychological problems, combined with the disintegration of his third marriage, the fallout from his work on the coroner’s jury in an arson case in Chicago and his ousting as director of Parkway, contributed to a psychological breakdown and Cayton fleeing Chicago.

In 1949, Cayton relocated to New York, where he continued to battle the alcoholism and drug abuse problems that would plague his adult life and was in and out of treatment facilities. While in New York, Cayton cycled through a variety of positions while maintaining his column in the Pittsburgh Courier . He was a researcher with the American Jewish Committee from 1950 to 1951, correspondent covering the United Nations for the Pittsburgh Courier from 1952 to 1954, researcher for the National Council of Churches from 1954 to 1958 and an instructor for the City Colleges of New York from 1957 to 1958.

In 1960, Cayton once again relocated, this time to California to be near his brother, Revels Cayton, who would help support him financially. In 1961, Cayton stopped writing for the Pittsburgh Courier and began working for the University of California in a variety of positions, including as a researcher and instructor. Cayton also played a major role in organizing the Asilomar Negro Writers Conference in August 1964, which brought black writers and others from across the country to Pacific Grove, Ca., to discuss the state of the field and to share their creative works. Cayton wrote his autobiography, Long Old Road ,in 1965 and moved on to his next major project, a biography of his former friend and colleague, writer Richard Wright. In 1968, he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Richard Wright biography. Unfortunately, Cayton was unable to complete the biography, passing away in Paris on January 22, 1970 while conducting research for the book project.

Sources

• Cayton, Horace R. Long Old Road : Back to Black Metropolis . Trident Press, 1965.
• Hobbs, Richard S. The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family . Washington State University Press, 2002.
• Jackson, John P. “Cayton, Horace Roscoe,” in African American National Biography, v. 2 . Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Oxford University Press, 2008: p. 218-219.
• Weitzman, Lisa. “Horace Cayton” in Contemporary Black Biography, v. 26 . Dave Oblender, editor. Gale Group, 2001: p. 36-39.
• “ Black Metropolis ( Drake and Cayton),” in Encyclopedia of the Great Migration, v. 1 . Greenwood Press, 2006: p. 100-101.

Scope and Content Note

This collection has been arranged into 14 series: biography and family records, manuscripts, correspondence, Parkway Community House, Richard Wright Book Project, the Stanley Stevens Addition, subject research files, programs, Horace Cayton’s Scrapbook, serials, clippings, audiovisual materials, photographs and memorabilia.

Related collections at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection include: The Susan Cayton Woodson Papers, The Illinois Writers Project/Negro in Illinois Papers, the Irma Cayton Wertz Papers, the Chicago Afro-American Analytic Union Catalog Archives, the Dorothy Rogers Livingston Papers and the Langston Hughes Papers. Researchers may also find Horace Cayton correspondence in the Richard Wright Papers at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.

Series 1: Biography and Family Records, 1866-1970 This series contains material relevant to the life of Horace Cayton and other Cayton family members. Horace Cayton’s academic records, resumes and biographical statements, as well as materials documenting his death in Paris in 1970 and memorial services held in Chicago and Santa Cruz, Ca., are in this series. Cayton’s biographical materials have been arranged chronologically while the family records have been arranged alphabetically.

Series 2: Manuscripts, 1880-1969 Included in this series are short stories, book reviews, speeches and writings by Horace Cayton including a run of Cayton’s column in the Pittsburgh Courier . While the column ran intermittently from 1939 to 1961, an incomplete run of the column from 1941 to 1947 maintained by Cayton is represented in this collection. Of note is a manuscript by Horace Cayton and Sydney Williams, “Inquest on the Body of Ruth Griggs,” which documents the pair’s influence on a jury in an arson case that exposed the evils of slum housing and racial discrimination in the city of Chicago. Also included in this series are manuscripts by other authors, namely academic colleagues and other writers, on issues ranging from racial and economic problems to education and family. The bulk of the manuscripts are from the 1940s and the 1960s.

Series 3: Correspondence, 1897-2006 Arranged alphabetically, this series includes Horace Cayton’s correspondence to and from family members, academic and professional colleagues, fellow writers and personal acquaintances. Notable correspondents include Arna Bontemps, Cyrus Colter, St. Clair Drake, Herbert Hill, Gunnar Myrdal, Adam Clayton Powell, Percival L. Prattis and Saunders Redding. Following Cayton’s correspondence is a run of correspondence between correspondents other than Horace Cayton, mainly other Cayton family members. Also included in the are Cayton’s proposal for a study of the American experience of African students at institutions of higher learning in the state of California.

Series 4: Parkway Community House, 1939-1993 This series contains programs, photographs, clippings and pamphlets that document the activities of Parkway Community House, the majority of which date from the 1940s. Included in this series are programs and photographs from productions of the Skyloft Players or Skyloft Theater. The theater, founded by Langston Hughes, was an important part of Parkway Community House. Also in this series are two videotapes from the 1993 Parkway Community Oral History Project. Additional Parkway photos may be found in the photograph series—series 13.

Series 5: Richard Wright Book Project, 1908-1970 This series documents Horace Cayton’s biographical book project on Richard Wright, which he conceived sometime in the mid-1960s and received funding for from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1968. The materials in this series have been organized into manuscripts, correspondence, clippings, other related files and audiovisual materials. The manuscript portion consists of documents authored by Horace Cayton about Richard Wright, book reviews, articles and manuscripts by Richard Wright, as well as book reviews, articles and other pieces about Richard Wright by other authors. The correspondence largely consists of correspondence between Horace Cayton and others who were acquainted with Richard Wright, along with various publishers, editors and others interested in the book project. The audiovisual portion of this collection consists of oral history interviews from 1968 conducted by Horace Cayton with acquaintances and colleagues of Richard Wright along with Cayton’s interview notes.

Series 6: Stanley Stevens Addition, 1935-2007 The Stanley Stevens Addition consists of materials collected and maintained by Stanley Stevens, a close friend of Horace Cayton, while Cayton lived in California during the 1960s. These files were arranged by Stanley Stevens prior to their accession and have been maintained in the order he assigned. They include photographs, manuscripts and correspondence between Susan Cayton Woodson and Stanley Stevens before and after the passing of Horace Cayton, as well as other files relating to acquaintances and friends of Horace Cayton who survived his passing.

Series 7: Subject Research Files, 1928-1969 The subject research files have been organized alphabetically by subject. The bulk of subjects covered in this series date from Cayton’s time in California. This series includes materials from Cayton’s work with Advance/VISTA—a Richmond, Ca., community development program, materials from a Negro marketing study that Cayton hoped to complete, Madge Cayton’s social work course materials and the curriculum and course materials from Horace Cayton’s “Roots of Revolt” course, which he taught at the University of California.

Series 8: Programs, 1936-1969 This short series includes programs that Cayton participated in during the 1960s as well as programs for various popular stage plays and shows from the 1930s.

Series 9: Horace Cayton’s Scrapbook, 1940s-1969 The scrapbook series includes a scrapbook that Cayton collected and maintained himself, with clippings, programs and photographs that focus on Horace Cayton. These materials were collected from the 1940s through the late 1960s.

Series 10: Serials, 1919-1968 Of particular note in this series of serials and publications are runs of “The DeBunker,” “The Halderman-Julius Monthly” and “The Joseph-McCabe Magazine” as well as rare African American published serials from the 1930s.

Series 11: Clippings, 1934-1969 This short series includes Horace Cayton’s clipping files on family members including his second wife, Irma Cayton, Horace Cayton, Sr., Hiram Revels, Revels Cayton and Lillie Cayton. Also included is a clipping file of book reviews and announcements of Horace Cayton’s autobiography, Long Old Road .

Series 12: Audiovisual, c. 1950s-2001 A series of recorded correspondence between Horace Cayton and longtime friend Lore Segal, dating from the 1950s, represents the bulk of this series. Also included is an audiocassette of a memorial tribute to Horace Cayton and a videotape donated to the collection by Bonnie Branch that features her on a panel about multiracial families in Thurston County, Wash.

Series 13: Photographs, c. 1915-1970 This series contains more than 250 photographs that document the life of Horace Cayton. A number of the photographs in this series are from events and activities held at Parkway Community House. Photographs of Cayton in this series illustrate his youth in Seattle, his time as a researcher and sociologist in Chicago, his relocation to California in the 1960s and finally his trip to Paris. Friends, colleagues and family members of Cayton are also represented in this series.

Series 14: Memorabilia, c. 1930s-1969 Posters, address books, calendars, and business and membership cards are included in this series. Also in this series are two separate note-card files maintained by Horace Cayton, one containing addresses and contacts and the other containing book and article title lists.

Container List

Horace R. Cayton Papers, Predominant dates, 1941-1969, Inclusive dates, 1866-2007

Box 5