Horace R. Cayton, Jr., Long Old Road

Four disparate people—an ex-slave, a United States Senator, a wisp of a mulatto Quaker girl, and a proud white plantation owner’s daughter—were my grandparents. Each has had an influence on me and my family. My father’s father had been proud and courageous, refusing to be held down by caste or class proscriptions. Born and raised a slave, he ended as a prosperous, independent farmer who provided my father with an education and the desire to escape the southland. My mother’s father became a symbol of achievement for all Negroes by achieving the highest position a Negro had ever held in the history of our country. My Quaker grandmother maintained a cultured home from which my mother took her inspiration and which had forged religious steel into my mother’s character. And the white woman, who was my grandmother and whose name I never knew, made us aware that all man-made barriers are penetrable; for the blood of the masters flowed in our veins.

Each had in his or her way rebelled, and all except the lonely white woman had succeeded. We, unlike most Negroes, lived in a tradition of success, achievement, and hope for Negro liberation. With such sterling examples to guide us, surrender to prejudice seemed cowardly and unnecessary. Our goals were dictated by our past; we were obligated by our family history to achievement in our fight for individual and racial equality.

We lived in a large, two-story white house on Capitol Hill, the most wealthy residential area of Seattle. It faced a broad avenue with a garden area in the center, which led directly to the water tower in Volunteer Park. We were the only Negro family in that part of town; all our neighbors were white and wealthy. Across from us was the Denny Blane estate. Mr. Blane was one of the wealthy old pioneers for whom an important street of the city had been named. As a newspaper editor and publisher, my father was known and respected in the community, and though we were not warm social friends, our neighbors were pleasant and respectful.

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Our house was not the most luxurious in the neighborhood but it was well built and beautiful, set on a small hill surrounded by a long terraced lawn. Near the house were banks of flowers, shrubbery, and rose bushes. In back was a stable where our horses were kept and the carriage was stored. Before my parents moved to Capitol Hill, they had owned a house near the center of the city, and as the business area expanded they had sold it at great profit to move into this exclusive area. Both Mother and Dad wanted to live and raise their children in comfort, if not luxury.

Mother dominated our home like the southern lady that she was. She was a handsome, perhaps a beautiful woman, tall and of stately bearing. Her complexion was a light olive, and her dark brown hair and eyes enhanced the attractiveness of her oval face. She had the cultivated grace which was characteristic of many southern women who had been reared in gentle homes. She was a woman of many accomplishments; her education was more extensive than was usual for a women in Seattle, for in addition to graduating from college she had continued her studies while working as a schoolteacher. Having become interested in writing, she had written a number of short stories, some of which were published in my father’s paper before they were married.

Her voice was soft and rather throaty, and her speech was slow and deliberate with but a trace of a southern accent. Though her general disposition was gentle and amicable, at times she showed a hard streak in her personality; she was a curious mixture of the warm earthiness of my Methodist grandfather and the tight primness of my Quaker grandmother. If we ran afoul of what she called her principles—her Quaker beliefs—we would feel the full weight of her towering disapproval.

Of course sex was a tabooed subject, not only for religious reasons but because any discussion of it was considered common and exactly what white people expected of Negroes. We

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children soon learned to identify any sort of loose sexual behavior or talk with lower-class Negroes and to look down upon it. And there were parts of the city, the sporting area, where we were not even allowed to ride through in our carriage, for those people were morally corrupt and of great discredit to the race.

Mother had first met Dad when he came to Alcorn College as a student. She was then just a little girl; my father was ten years her senior. After finishing college my father migrated to Salt Lake City, Utah, and then to Seattle, where, after a short time, he was able to get a job on one of the newspapers as a reporter. After a few years Dad established a small weekly of his own. In the meantime, Mother finished college and began to send him her short stories and reports of news events, which he published.

The suspicion that my parents had married for mutual advantage rather than love developed in me at an early age. Both my mother and my father were to us children than they were to each other. They never exchanged words of affection and addressed each other very formally for a man and wife. Mother usually called my father “Mr. Cayton,” perhaps another Quaker hang-over; Dad referred to her as Susie only when he had to speak to her directly. At all other times, it was “your mother” or, to anyone outside the family, “Mrs. Cayton.” Their behavior toward each other was controlled rather than spontaneous, and there was no display of physical affection.

We always knew when Mother was angry or disagreed with Dad, for she would say, “May I speak to you, Mr. Cayton?”—and they would leave the room to have their argument. When I was a little older, I asked Mother on several occasions if she really loved Dad, and she would inevitably answer, “I respect your father; that is sufficient.”

But if it was a marriage of convenience—on my mother’s part to escape the South, and enabling my father to make an

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alliance with a prominent family of the Negro elite—both tried desperately to keep the agreement. At seventy my mother could boast that, “I’ve known no man but your father”; and Dad at the time of his death said, “She is a difficult woman, but a good one.”

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. . . In 1909 the famous and renowned Booker T. Washington came to the Alaskan, Yukon and Pacific Exposition, which was held in Seattle, and it was natural that he should stay with our family. It was a great event for all the Negroes in the city, and we were at the hub of the activities. The first day, Dad drove Dr. Washington around Capitol Hill and through the Volunteer Park district, pointing out the homes of the rich and influential white people. The next day, however, the educator told my father that he was more interested in how the Negroes lived, and a somewhat chastised Dad took Dr. Washington to visit the leading Negro families.

Booker T. Washington’s fame was then at its height. He had recently delivered his famous Atlanta speech, in which he had defined the relationship which should exist between Negroes and whites in the South. In all things social, he had said, Negroes and whites should be separate as the fingers of the hand; in things economic, they should be like the closed fist. This homely simplification of the problem of cooperation and segregation delighted southerners, and overnight Washington was considered not only the leader of Negroes, but the Saviour of the South.

There were legions of stories about Dr. Washington’s fame. Like the Negro orator who kept referring to Booker T. Washington as the father of his country. When told by a friend that George Washington, not Booker Washington, was the father of his country, the speaker replied, “Well, I knew it was one of those Washington boys.”

Or the story of the old farmer who had removed a bridge

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over a stream on his property and was being implored to put it back so that a hunting party could cross. When this brought no results, he was informed that Teddy Roosevelt was a member of the group. But the old Negro replied, “I don’t care if it’s Booker T. Washington, I’m not goin’ to lay them logs again.”

Dr. Washington was a modest man who did not care to talk about his meeting with the President, but one evening, after a particularly good dinner, he did tell one story concerning the White House luncheon. Not long after it he was riding a train through Georgia and, at a stop in a small town, a group of white Georgia crackers recognized him and came into the car to speak with him.

“Booker,” their spokesman said, “we heard about your Atlanta speech and we think you are the greatest living American.”

Having a sly sense of humor, the educator declined the compliment and replied, “How can you say that? What about President Roosevelt?”

“Oh,” the Georgian answered, “we used to think he was the greatest—until he had lunch with you.”

But Dr. Washington’s visit was not all pleasant, for one evening my father got into a heated discussion with him. The educator was a firm advocate of the Negro’s accepting the southern situation and working within it for self-improvement. “Let down your buckets where you are,” he advised southern Negroes.

My father, on the other hand, was impatient with Negroes who stayed in the South, and his hatred of things southern was deep and profound. “I can’t understand why more Negroes don’t get out of the South, Dr. Washington. There is no hope for them down there. Sometimes I even question your good work, Doctor, when you advise southern Negroes to be patient and educate themselves to be laborers.”

“Perhaps,” answered Dr. Washington softly, a little patron-

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izingly, “they don’t leave because it is their home and they love it. Or they don’t have the money. Doubtless many are afraid to leave. They lack the pioneer spirit of you and your friends here in the city. Besides, they can’t all leave. If they did, the North would soon be just like the South. As for my work, what I teach them they can use in the South or any place they may go.”

“But that’s just it, Professor—it’s what you teach them. Of course, you are right when you say that a race cannot prosper until it learns that it is just as dignified to till a field as to write a poem. And certainly most of us have to start at the bottom of life and cannot begin at the top. But these are just the things that the southern whites want to hear. It justifies them in keeping the Negro on the lowest possible level. And it robs the Negro of his ambition for greater things. It makes him satisfied to live in a society where he is kept at the very bottom.”

“Mr. Cayton,” the educator replied, “may I say that it seems to me that you have forgotten much about the South? The great majority of Negroes live there and must make a working compromise with the southern whites. The Negro problem will be won or lost in the Deep South.”

Dr. Washington did not wish to continue the discussion with this small-town newspaperman who had challenged his position. He had eaten with the President; he had been honored by Harvard and Dartmouth; he was president of the National Negro Business League. He felt that my father was a visionary and impractical, or perhaps he had an inbred disregard for the northern Negro intellectual. But Dad was not to be stopped.

“You speak about the compromise the Negro has to make in the South. Well, it has been too much of a compromise, because your philosophy acquiesces in the disenfranchisement of the Negro. It accepts the proscriptions in civil life which are forced upon the Negro by the black codes and it agrees

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to the withdrawal of aid to institutions of higher learning where Negroes could be taught to be lawyers, doctors, dentists. I have been reading of Dr. Du Bois and his Niagara movement and I must say, if you will forgive me, Dr. Washington, that I am more attracted to his way of thinking. The Negro is an insanity which exists in the mind of the white southerner. There is no compromise with this attitude. The colored people of this country should make a bold strike for freedom, the freedom which is denied them in the South. Here in the Northwest we are striking out in every direction. Negroes in this town have become small businessmen or skilled mechanics and live a good life. Their children are getting educations and will be able to stand up and compete with other men. Here the race is to the swiftest, and here the American dream is being won. I believe in it and I love it. I believe in democracy. And here democracy is being worked out. We are the new frontier, and thousands of Negroes come to this part of the country and stand up like men and compete with their white brothers. And those who stay in the South should carry on a relentless fight for their freedom down there.”

Dr. Washington slowly rose from his chair, his face remaining undisturbed and his manner calm and quiet. But it was evident that he was inwardly angry over what had just been said. “The Negro is not in a position to make a bid for freedom at present, Mr. Cayton. He needs discipline and training, not political action. The southern situation is more complicated than you make it. Our northern friends have a tendency to oversimplify. The South was defeated, not destroyed; today it is influencing more of the country than you are perhaps aware. You speak of the insanity in the South with regard to the Negro. I sincerely hope, Mr. Cayton, that insanity does not overcome you here in the relative freedom of the Northwest. I hope that the infection of Negro prejudice does not spread to this part of the country. If it does, you may

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find that you have been living in a fool’s paradise. In any case, I am tired now and shall retire. Good night.”

Mr. Walker and my father were silent for a few moments after the educator left the room. My father felt satisfied with the fact that he had differed with the eminent Dr. Washington, for he believed fervently in the newer ideas which were then being introduced by William E. B. Du Bois. But he also felt a bit dazzled at his own daring in challenging this great figure in open debate.

“He is a great man, Walker, but I think he is wrong. I think he’s wrong and this young fellow Du Bois is right. At least he’s right for us, for here. We have an opportunity and a great challenge, not only for us but for all Negroes and for the American dream. We can prove that America is right. You left the South and you have succeeded. And I, an ex-slave, now have a fine business, a family, and the respect and regard, even affection, of thousands of people in this city. To be wrong would mean that my life and your life and the lives of all our friends here in this city counted for nothing. We have escaped the South and we have found a new freedom and a new country and a new world to win.”

Mr. Walker nodded his head in agreement, “Yes, that is true. But he is a smart man, Cayton; he is a very, very smart man. I hope what he says doesn’t come true.”

Changes were in fact beginning to take place in Seattle. In the years between the Gold Rush and the World War, the city had come into its own. It had become less isolated, more a part of the United States rather than its western outpost. The population of the city had grown from 42,000 to 80,000 between 1890 and 1900, and between the latter date and 1910 it leaped to 237,000. With this increase in population had come a huge increase in the number of Negroes in the city.

But it had come to us gradually that our number was growing. We first noticed it in the greater number of Negroes we met when we went downtown. Before, it had been only occa-

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sionally that we would meet another Negro. We usually stopped to talk and later reported the event at the dinner table, for it was customary to speak to every colored person we met whether we knew him or not. Soon these meetings with people we did not know became so numerous that we ceased to report them at dinner, but rather began to speculate about the numbers of Negroes who were flocking to the city. Our feeling about this was mixed. It was good to see Negroes leaving the South and coming to the relative freedom of the Northwest, but would it not upset our amicable relations with whites if too many came?

All of this had its effect on my father’s paper, for gradually more and more Negro news crept in where before the paper had been devoted to political events. Gradually, some of the white subscriptions began to fall off, and the newly arrived Negroes did not make up for this loss in circulation. It was evident that the paper would have to be redefined; a more specific audience would have to be found for its long editorials and sharp political comments.

It was in 1917 that my father took a desperate step, forced into it by the paper’s possible failure. Perhaps the slogan of the day (Make the world safe for democracy) helped my father decide to take a stand on the issue of Negro rights in the paper. I knew little of my father’s inner struggle at the time, for I was only fourteen, but it was a struggle which I, too, was to endure before many years had passed.

But I was as shocked as the rest of the family, one Friday, to see on the front page of the Seattle Republican a story about a cruel lynching in Mississippi. I knew that lynchings were going on in the South from the conversations my parents had with friends, but I had paid little attention to them. They were only occasionally mentioned in the papers and then in no detail. My father, however, had fully reported a most brutal and horrible mob action in which a Negro had been

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chained to a tree and burned alive; every detail of the ghastly story had been told in vivid prose.

Mother was in a quandary. She disapproved of the story, but her racial loyalty prevented her from criticizing its publication. We children were simply stunned; lynching until then had not concerned us deeply, but with this story in my father’s paper we became involved in a personal way.

If the story shocked the members of our family, it must have come as a complete bombshell to my father’s white readers. Many of them must have found the account utterly unbelievable, a macabre joke, in bad taste at a time when America was fighting a war for democracy.

One evening, a little over a week after the story appeared, two men—government men, Mother said—came to get Dad. They spoke to him quietly in the front room for a short time, then he called Mother, and they whispered together for a few moments. Then Dad left with the two officers and did not return until the next day. The matter was never mentioned after my father’s return.

But that was not the end of the affair. Cancellations of subscriptions flooded my father’s office from shocked readers, and advertising fell off, too. It was apparent that the paper was rapidly failing. The last issue of the Seattle Republican was published just three months after that story of the Mississippi lynching had occupied the front page.

My father and his paper had been the victims of the changing pattern of race relations in the city. With the new immigration the pattern was slowly beginning to change: there was no longer a place for an in-between group, and everyone became identified as either Negro or white. We were, to my knowledge, the only Negro family to feel so dramatically the impact of these social forces, and our fall from our unique position was swift and, for us, painful.

The horses and carriage were the first things to go. Then we

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had to face up to the loss of our Capitol Hill home, as well as the services of Nish. Dad still had hopes of regaining his fortune by investing in a suburb of the city called Green Lake. But this hope was soon dashed, as he was unable to raise the money to improve the property, and the taxes were high in that rapidly growing portion of the city. About six months after the paper closed we moved into a small house near Mt. Baker Park, on a steep hill overlooking Rainier Valley, a locality largely inhabited by newly arrived Italian immigrants.

My father’s comedown in the world was a cruel thing to witness. From his Green Lake holdings he was able to purchase a three-story, wooden-framed apartment house on Twenty-second Street near Jackson. At first he employed a janitor to tend the furnace and maintain the property, but as things got worse he had to take over this work himself. He would leave our house very early in the morning, to make the fire and haul down the garbage before people were up and could see him performing such menial tasks. Then he would return and dress to go downtown to beg for small writing jobs from politicians and to solicit newspaper advertisements from his old political friends. At first he would not allow us children to go with him to the apartment house, for it was a great comedown for this proud man to have to empty garbage cans. Later, however, he forgot his pride and often allowed me to accompany him on his morning chores.

Mother rallied to his support and attempted to meet the crisis with fortitude but she too suffered. Never having had the responsibility of taking care of a house, she proved an extremely poor housekeeper, though she worked hard at it. In spite of every economy that she effected, the income from the apartment house, which was half empty, plus Dad’s small earnings were just not enough to balance the budget. When Revels became severely ill it was necessary for her to find a part-time job as a housekeeper, and Madge began to help with

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the housework and the meals. Ruth, then in high school, got an after-school job but contributed little to the family income, using most of what she earned for clothes and school expenses.

The position of our family among the Negroes in the city underwent an almost complete change. There were those who were glad to witness our downfall; it was natural to smirk about the decline of the proud and arrogant Caytons. Mother gave up most of her cultural “uplift” activities and settled down to the hard grind of making a home for the family. My father found his previous role as leader being challenged but he maintained his pride and continued to speak with the authority born of his wide acquaintance with rich and powerful white people. But he no longer occupied his former, unique position of unquestioned authority.

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Horace R. Cayton, Jr., Long Old Road: An Autobiography (1963; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970), 2-6, 17-25.