Black publisher Horace Cayton arrives in Seattle in 1886.

  • By Helen Lacy
  • Posted 11/06/1998
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 242
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In 1886, Horace Cayton (1859-1940) comes to Seattle from Mississippi and by 1894 is publishing the Seattle Republican newspaper.

Horace Cayton was born a slave, the son of a slave and a slavemaster's daughter. After emancipation his father sent all his children to school. Cayton attended Alcorn College, where he studied with United States Senator Hiram Revels, for seven years.

Upon arriving in Seattle in 1886, he became a political reporter for the Post-Intelligencer (and was a supporter of the Republican Party).

In May 1894, he began publishing the Republican. He was assisted in this enterprise by his wife, the writer Susan Revels Cayton (1870-1943).


Sources:

Esther Hall Mumford, Seattle's Black Victorians, 1852-1901 (Seattle: Ananse Press, 1980), 86-91.


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