Horace R. Cayton, Sr.

Horace Roscoe Cayton, Sr. (1859–1940) was an American journalist and political activist. The son of a slave and a white plantation owner's daughter, Cayton went to Seattle, Washington, in the early 1890s, launching his own newspaper, the Seattle Republican, in 1894. The paper was the longest-lived of seven African-American published newspapers appearing Seattle between 1891 and 1901, terminating only in 1913.

A second publishing venture was launched by Cayton in 1916, with the launch of the eponymous Cayton's Weekly. Unlike its predecessor, this four-page tabloid was focused upon national and local news of interest to a black readership. Falling into financial difficulties in 1921, Cayton's Weekly briefly altered its production cycle to become Cayton's Monthly before folding completely.

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 (now Alcorn State University) and was attending that institution in 1872.

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, working at that paper until Its failure in 1893.

The following year, Cayton launched a newspaper of his own, the Seattle Republican, with its first issue seeing print in May 1894. The paper sought to appeal to both white and black readers, achieving some limited success in this regard, although the readership of the paper was modest, never exceeding about 2,000.

By 1896, Cayton married Susie Revels, a young woman he had met in college. Ms. Revels was the daughter of Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Reconstruction-era Republican from the state of Mississippi remembered as the first African-American elected to the United States Senate. After the couple's marriage, Susie Revels Cayton would become associate editor of the Seattle Republican.

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