Horace R. Cayton

Who was Horace R. Cayton?

Horace Roscoe Cayton Sr. was an American journalist and politician. The son of a slave and a white plantation owner's daughter, Cayton went to Seattle, Washington in the late 19th century 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 1880s.

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.