Cayton, Horace

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Cayton, Horace

April 12, 1903
January 22, 1970

Sociologist and educator Horace Roscoe Cayton Jr. was born in Seattle, Washington, the son of activist and newspaper publisher Horace R. Cayton Sr. and Susie Revels Cayton, the daughter of former U.S. Senator Hiram Revels. Cayton dropped out of high school in his junior year and signed up as a messman on a coastal steamer, and in the four succeeding years traveled to California, Mexico, and Hawaii. At the age of twenty, he returned to Seattle. After enrolling in a Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) preparatory school, he entered the University of Washington, supporting himself by working as a detective. In 1932 he graduated with a degree in sociology.

Invited by eminent sociologist Robert Park to the University of Chicago, Cayton became a research assistant and did graduate work there. In 1934 he became an assistant to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and helped draft a study of black workers in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1935 he was named instructor of economics and labor at Fisk University in Nashville. In 1936 he returned to Chicago, where he headed a Works Project Administration (WPA) research project that focused on Chicago innercity life. He also worked as a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier and various magazines. In 1939 he and George S. Mitchell coauthored a book, Black Workers and the New Unions, which discussed prejudice in the labor movement and examined the integration of blacks into steel, railroad, and meatpacking unions. The following year, after a study tour in Europe financed by a Rosenwald Foundation grant, Cayton was named director of Chicago's Parkway Community House, a black settlement house and study center. During World War II, Cayton refused to serve in a segregated army and enlisted in the Merchant Marine.

Cayton's best-known scholarly work is Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), which he cowrote with St. Clair Drake. Focusing on African-American life in Chicago, the book was hailed as an original study of urbanization in the United States. It received the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was named the outstanding book on race relations for 1945 by the New York Public Library.

In 1950 Cayton left Parkway Community House and was briefly a research assistant for the American Jewish Committee. Some time later, he was hired as a researcher by the National Council of Churches. He continued to write scholarly articles on such subjects as the sociology of mental disorders and the psychology of prejudice. In 1955 he and Setsuko Matsanuga Nishi cowrote The Changing Scene: Current Trends and Issues, a discussion of the attitudes of different churches toward social work. During this period, he also served as the Pittsburgh Courier 's correspondent at the United Nations. In 1959 Cayton was hired as professor of sociology by the University of California at Berkeley, a position he retained until his death. He published an autobiography, Long Old Road, in 1964.

In the late 1960s, Cayton became interested in writing a biography of his friend, the writer Richard Wright (who had written the introduction to Black Metropolis ). In 1968 he edited a special issue of Negro Digest devoted to Wright, and the next year traveled to France to do research for a biography. He died while in Paris, collecting material on Wright.