(This is a book for those who want to know what really hap...)
This is a book for those who want to know what really happens when, in circumstances of enormous complexity and under the impetus of the New Deal, an irresistible drive for labor organization runs head-on into an immovably imbedded race prejudice. It is based on interviews by the authors with those people most intimately concerned.
Originally published in 1939.
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Horace Roscoe Cayton was an American sociologist and writer who specialized in studies of working-class black Americans, particularly in mid-20th-century Chicago.
Background
Horace Roscoe Cayton was born on April 12, 1903 in Seattle, Washington, D. C. , United States. He was the son of Horace Roscoe Cayton, a newspaper reporter, editor, and publisher who had been born a slave, and Susie Sumner Revels, who had been educated at Alcorn College and Rust College, where she taught. The well-to-do Caytons had five children and lived in a solidly middle-class white neighborhood. Cayton's father's newspaper and political influence were respected throughout the city and state. Poor investments and decreased newspaper sales, however, drastically reduced the family's income, and so they moved to a working-class neighborhood. Growing racism in the region sharpened young Cayton's awareness of the inferior status of blacks in America. Cayton's youth as he described it in his autobiography, Long Old Road (1965), was troubled and conflict-ridden. He was jailed for sitting downstairs in a movie house that permitted blacks in the balcony only, and he was arrested for driving the getaway car in an abortive filling station robbery. His father's influence obtained his release without trial or police record, on condition that Horace spend time in a training and reform institution.
Education
In the eighth grade he was elected school forum president by his mainly white classmates, but racial discrimination became far more prevalent and painful during his sporadic years at Franklin High School. In his junior year (1919) he left school to work on a steamer and wander through Alaska. He returned to Seattle later that same year and through accelerated course work rejoined his class, but he plunged into renewed troubles and felt increasingly dispirited, frustrated, and hostile. He left school in 1920 and entered upon a four-year odyssey of hard manual labor, often frightening adventures, and a journey of self-discovery. He worked as a ship's steward, in a railroad camp, and as a scab longshoreman, and traveled throughout most of the Northwest and Southwest, Mexico, and Hawaii. At twenty Cayton attended a Young Men's Christian Association college preparatory school in Seattle and then entered the University of Washington (1925). Working his way through college as a sheriff's deputy (the only black deputy), he graduated in 1931 with a B. A. in sociology, and moved the same year with his new wife and fellow student, Bonnie Branch, to Chicago. He was awarded a fellowship at the University of Chicago, and intellectually his career began to blossom. Although he never completed his Ph. D. , within a few years he distinguished himself as a researcher, administrator, and writer, primarily in what would be called today "black studies. "
Career
For over two years Cayton was a research assistant in the graduate sociology program. The staff advocated intense study of Chicago as a laboratory subject. In the summer of 1932, Cayton edited a newsletter at Tuskegee Institute, but he found life there was too greatly affected by racism. In 1934 and 1935 he served as special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, with the special task of studying how New Deal legislation affected black laborers. His office was in New York, but his field of study ranged across the United States. In 1935 he sailed for the first time to Europe and arrived in Paris when French fascists were storming the Chamber of Deputies. At a left-wing protest meeting he was hailed as a spokesman for blacks. Returning to America, he taught economics at Fisk University (1935 - 1936), but at school's end he went back to Chicago with his second wife, Irma Jackson. His first marriage had dissolved, partly as a result of vocational and racial differences (she was a white social worker). In Chicago from 1936 to 1939, Cayton headed a research unit funded by the Works Progress Administration, under the guidance of the sociologist W. Lloyd Warner, studying the black community in Chicago. He returned to Europe as a Rosenwald Fund Fellow in 1939 and was nearly trapped there by the spreading war. Late that year, he accepted the directorship of Chicago's Parkway Community House, a position he held until 1949. For much of the 1940's he wrote a column for the Pittsburgh Courier and from 1952 to 1954 was the paper's correspondent at the United Nations. An alcoholic, Cayton suffered several psychological breakdowns during the 1940's and 1950's. He wrote about this time in detail in his frank--though sometimes factually cloudy--autobiography. He pieced together jobs during the 1950's and 1960's, performing research for the American Jewish Committee (1950 - 1951) and for the National Council of Churches of Christ (1954 - 1958). He taught at the City College of New York (1957 - 1958) and performed various jobs for the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco (1959 - 1960) and at the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency, Berkeley, Calif. (1960 - 1961). Early in the 1960's he lived briefly with his brother Revels, who had been a distinguished labor leader, in San Francisco and then established his own home in Santa Cruz. Sturdily built, Cayton was relatively light-complexioned, a matter of some importance to him as it affected his personal relationships. A frequent lecturer at universities and cultural symposia, he taught his last course, "Roots of Revolt, " at the University of California at Berkeley shortly before his death in Paris, where he had gone to do research for a biography of his friend Richard Wright. Cayton's first book, Black Workers and the New Unions (1939), written with George S. Mitchell, studies the history, role, and status of blacks in American labor unions, often depicting the racism engrained in many American labor organizations. Black Metropolis (1945; rev. ed. , 1962), written with St. Clair Drake, is a history and spirited social analysis of the black community in Chicago. Expressing hope for an end to racism to match the defeat of worldwide fascism, the book also exposes the pervasive prejudice and discrimination confronting blacks in Chicago and, by implication, all American blacks. Both works have been praised consistently by critics and authorities, particularly Black Metropolis, which won the Anisfield-Wolf Award for 1945. Cayton's periodical essays and reviews reveal sharp perception of the special pressures affecting black figures such as Richard Wright and Paul Robeson. Often ironic and caustic, a journeyer in black, white, and racially mixed worlds, he seems always the maverick, unable finally to be anything but an American black, though doubting that blacks as a group would ever be accepted as equals in their homeland; reminding white Americans during World War II that American blacks were not always displeased by Japanese triumphs over their white enemies in the Pacific; and telling black Americans there was little of the African in them anymore. Though Cayton quarreled bitterly with the fate imposed for so long upon American blacks, he never stopped attempting to better their lives through his research and writing. When he was not flattened by despair, he lived and wrote fully and passionately.
Achievements
Cayton is best remembered as the co-author of a seminal 1945 study of South Side, Chicago, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City.
