(uplifting music) - Historic landmarks are often treasured for their architectural style, but the true significance of a place is if it tells a remarkable story about its inhabitants.

That's the case with a modest Victorian rental house on Seattle's Capitol Hill.

It's a survivor of more than 120 years, uncommon in a city of rapid change, but it also embodies a story of triumph and tragedy as few other landmarks in the city do.

It was here that a black family created a legacy that spanned a century, a legacy more relevant than ever.

(playful music) Horace Cayton, Sr., was a young, black man enslaved at birth who, with freedom, got an education and came West to seek his fortune in the late 19th century.

He got a job at the Seattle PI, but eventually decided to start his own newspaper, which he did in 1894.

The Seattle Republican, his newspaper startup was called.

It was for a general, mostly white audience.

Seattle's black community was small at that time.

And it succeeded brilliantly.

It was said to have become the second most read newspaper in Seattle.

The paper's politics were progressive in the era of Teddy Roosevelt and reform.

Horace was aided by his wife, Susie Sumner Revels.

She, like Horace, was from Mississippi, college educated.

She had a degree in nursing.

Her father, a minister of renown, was the first black man elected to Congress.

He was selected as a U.S.

Senator from Mississippi, incredibly, a post once occupied by the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis.

Hiram Revels was a giant figure during Reconstruction, the university president, a preacher, and he was much respected.

That defender of slavery, Jeff Davis, reputedly said he did not want a black man representing the state, but if there had to be one, he was glad it was Hiram Revels.

Susie Cayton met Horace in college, but they reconnected through the newspaper when Horace sent a copy of the Republican to her father, who was impressed by it.

Susie came West, they married, and she wrote and edited for the paper as its associate editor.

Horace voiced his opinion on all manner of things, including the struggle for equal rights and the politics of both the white and black communities.

Seattle seemed like a good place to make that work.

Racial lines were less visible, not so entrenched.

Horace hoped his success was an example of progress in racial tolerance.

It lifted his family into the upper middle class.

Historian Quintard Taylor, Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, has said Cayton was, quote, "By far the most prominent African American in the Pacific Northwest in the first decade of the 20th century."

He was one of the few black men to be allowed into the exclusive sanctum of state GOP politics of the time.

Success allowed the Caytons to move into a lovely home near the affluent section of Capitol Hill known as Millionaires Row.

Prominent guests found their way to the Caytons' door.

Horace once took Booker T. Washington on a carriage tour of the neighborhood.

There was a brief time in Seattle's early history, Professor Taylor has observed, when blacks could succeed a moment of hope.

But something soured in Seattle, and Cayton's hopes were slowly dashed.

(soft sad music) As the black population grew from a few hundred to over 2,000, Whites Only signs began to appear.

Neighborhoods began inserting covenants banning people of color from living there.

Whites moved in, bringing intolerant attitudes.

Blacks were used as strikebreakers, often intentionally to inflame racial hostilities to break strikes in the mines or on the docks.

This alienated many working class whites who blamed them for lost jobs.

As the KKK and lynchings in the south began to increase and Horace decried the violence more vociferously, he began to lose white readers, and crucially, white advertisers.

White newspapers editorialized that by attacking lynching, Cayton was arguing against protecting white womanhood.

Something shifted between 1902 and 1907, time when the Caytons lived in their Capitol Hill home.

The paper's fortune shifted too, and The Republican eventually folded in 1913.

Horace and Susie were forced to sell their house and move to the segregated central district.

Cayton's plan for gaining the American dream was dashed.

But the family was committed to civil rights and equality.

Horace helped found the local chapter of the NAACP.

Susie herself became a social and civil rights activist.

The Caytons' eldest daughter, Madge, was one of the first black women to graduate from the University of Washington.

Their two sons were deeply affected by their experience in the family story.

The eldest, Horace Cayton, Jr., left for Chicago and became a prominent sociologist who broke new ground as co-author of the first book on the black urban experience, "Black Metropolis."

Younger brother, Revels, became radicalized by his family's experience.

Revels, a labor organizer in San Francisco, rose in the ranks of waterfront unions and worked with the likes of longshore leader Harry Bridges.

The Cayton-Revels family hit hard times, but not only did they struggle through it, they left a legacy that is valuable today, not just about hard work, but devotion to seeking equal rights and justice for all through writing, education, civic engagement, activism, and scholarship.

And in a remarkable symbolic happenstance, right across the street from the Cayton-Revels house, half a century later, a baby lived his first year of life, an infant named Barack Obama.

He lived in an apartment there with his mother Ann, a UW student.

A valued memento still in the Cayton family is an artifact almost too incredible to believe.

Jefferson Davis presented Hiram Revels with a clock.

It passed to daughter Susie Revels, who kept it on the mantle of their Capitol Hill home.

It's still in the family.

It's a timepiece that marks the hours and days.

It also embodies the complexities, the triumphs, the hopes, and tragedies of our collective history.

The clock is still running.

- [Announcer] "Mossback's Northwest" is made possible by the generous support of Bedrooms and More.