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By Mark Trahant So much of our history is written from a limited point of view. We know about the families that started and ran The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune or The Los Angeles Times. We chart the lineage of CBS or NBC. Then we write the stories of what happened and call it history. But there are other stories out there. Stories about people who1s ideas did not survive the times. Such is the story of Horace Roscoe Cayton. More than a century ago Cayton was the publisher of The Seattle Republican. His was a newspaper that preached the American dream. And why not? His own life made a terrific anecdote: He was born a slave on a Mississippi plantation. He was 5 when his family was emancipated. He worked on his family's farm, then migrated to Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Portland and, finally, Seattle. He had been a teacher, lands office manager and cattle buyer. He married a classmate from Alcorn College; Susie Sumner Revels was the daughter of Hiram Revels, the first African American U.S. senator. The Caytons lived on fashionable Capitol Hill. The newspaper was a success. And Cayton was, in essence, a member of the Republican Party's state central committee. But much of Cayton's story is now forgotten. His narrative didn't have the required happy ending. Cayton's newspaper failed in 1913. He lost his home, and the party hacks whom he had endorsed did not return favors. Politics was partly to blame. The Seattle Republican spoke out for minority groups, and carried accounts of Southern lynchings with this comment: "May the Lord have mercy on the men's souls who do such for we feel that they are ignorant, semi-barbaric and devoid of either Christian or social influences. Send them missionaries." Changing demographics also played a role: Seattle was growing from pioneer town - where one's abilities could trump race - into a city that increasingly embraced segregation. Cayton tried to bridge this gulf. "He felt obliged in his newspaper to speak against prejudice and violence. Within a few months of his crusade, only the black population was subscribing to the Republican," said a Washington state civil-rights report in 1968. "A man who had held a high community position was reduced, within a very few years, to janitorial work." The publisher was no longer even welcome in much of his community. By 1920, many local businesses posted signs reading "We don't serve Coloreds." Only one city cafe would welcome African Americans. Perhaps Cayton's newspaper would have survived if he had shunned racial issues and hid behind his byline. But that would have been out of character. Indeed it's that story of character that's so important to the larger story called history. We need to know the extraordinary challenges faced by people in generations before us -- and learn from their success and failure. We need to hear the stories that should never be forgotten -- like those that begin on the Maynard Institute's web site this month from the civil rights era. Listen to the words of Ed Bradley, Nancy Maynard, Earl Caldwell, Claude Lewis and Wallace Terry and let their words lift the limits of what we call history.
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