|
|
|
Reviews
The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family
|
By Richard S. Hobbs
|
Washington State University Press, Pullman, 2002. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 264 pages. $21.95 paper.
|
Reviewed by Patricia A. Schechter
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
|
|
|
|
Richard S. Hobbs has written an engaging and highly informative
family history with The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family.
This multifaceted portrait of two generations of Cayton men and
women is richly rewarding. It follows the family founders from the
post–Civil War South to Seattle, where they lived for decades,
and then traces their children's wide-ranging work across the United
States and Europe.
|
1
|
|
Susan Revels was the daughter of Hiram Revels of Mississippi, the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate. She had a genteel upbringing, was educated at Rust College, and had a short teaching career. These interests and training transferred to church- and club-related work in community uplift in Seattle. Horace Roscoe Cayton's immediate background was tied to slavery in Mississippi; he was the son of his white owner and a slave woman. The opportunities of Reconstruction allowed him to get an education, and he graduated from Mississippi's Alcorn University. Leaving school just as Reconstruction ended, Cayton sensed that opportunity lay elsewhere. Like other African Americans who escaped the lowering boom of Jim Crow, he migrated westward, settling in Seattle in 1890 and trying his hand at a number of trades, including journalism, along the way. He corresponded with the Revels family, whom he had met at Alcorn, and eventually established a connection with Susan. Over time, their letters became a source for journalistic collaboration, courtship, and then marriage in 1896. |
2
|
|
Hobbs's chapters on Horace Cayton, Sr., contribute significantly to our understanding of elite and middle-class black life in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the intersections with party politics and the business sector. Cayton's roles as entrepreneurial booster, ward heeler, and community watchdog intertwined with the patronage and machine relationships that gave northern African Americans some traction with the Republican Party. The Caytons embraced their "representative" status as spokespeople, exemplars, and community leaders principally through Horace's editorship of the Seattle Republican between 1894 and 1913. The financial and political structure that underwrote their paper and the Caytons' social standing was fragile, however, and when Republicans retreated from black voters in the racist backlash before World War I, the paper folded, and the Caytons faced a slow, painful decline into poverty. This decline, accelerated by the Great Depression, made Horace brittle, if not bitter, by the time of his death in 1940. |
3
|
|
Horace and Susan raised six children in all: two sons, Horace, Jr., and Revels; three daughters, Ruth, Madge, and Lillie; and a granddaughter, Susie, who was orphaned by her father's desertion and Ruth's death. Much of the family's ambitions rested with the sons, and the daughters seemingly filled in the cracks as best they could. Madge was able to exploit these cracks and graduate from the University of Washington. She was a career social worker, but Hobbs suggests that her primary life commitment was as caretaker of the family, first of her parents and then of her brothers until she died in 1944. Ruth rebelled early and married a working-class man her parents disapproved of. Lillie also rebelled, into the "sporting" life, and was shunned for it. After struggling with alcoholism for many years, Lillie eventually found a stable life path through Alcoholics Anonymous and became a highly effective speaker for AA in the western region. |
4
|
|
The heart of this book is the careers of the two Cayton sons, Horace, Jr., and Revels. Each man grappled rather differently with the proud legacy of being a Cayton and with the vagaries of racism in the twentieth century. None of the Cayton men got along well together, and the brothers struggled with a lifelong rivalry and personality clashes. Revels faced health and school challenges that pushed him out to sea as a teen. He sought leftist politics, unionism, and community organizing on the West Coast, especially San Francisco, becoming active in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union and participating in the strikes of 1934 and 1936. |
5
|
|
The life of Horace, Jr., is by far the best documented, as he worked as a scholar and journalist for much of his life. He is best known today for his monumental sociological work, Black Metropolis, written with St. Clare Drake and published in 1945. He also garnered attention and accolades with his autobiography, Long Old Road. As the head of Chicago's Parkway Community House — heir to Chicago's small, but determined interracial settlement legacy — Horace, Jr., sponsored a wide array of community-building and cultural activities, always with style and fanfare. |
6
|
|
Hobbs has a fine ear for stories and for presenting telling details from a wide range of sources, including oral history interviews he completed for this book. Racism took an enormous emotional and psychological toll on the Caytons, in addition to threatening their financial well-being and physical safety. Among the many devastating insights that the book offers into the workings of racism is the following exchange between Horace, Jr., and Richard Wright. The two men reflected in the mid-1940s on what they perceived to be a "folklore of race relations" in the United States, the "mechanisms which circumvent changes and maintain the subordination of the Negro and which lead to his corruption and cynicism," in Horace's words. Wright continued: "I am now more convinced than ever that we Americans have subtly evolved a magic, a folklore of race relations.... They form council, committees, etc., and then proceed to say that their hearts are in the right places, that it must be hell to be a Negro, that this and that ought to be done. And they wind up with nothing concretely done. The main problem of shunting Negroes into a separate life is not really touched" (p. 134). These words still ring today. |
7
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|