Horace Cayton was an African-American sociologist born in Seattle in 1903. His father was born a slave; his mother was the daughter of the first black U.S. Congressman. This is an excerpt from his autobiography, The Long Old Road, published in 1963. At 16, my life seemed to add up to very little. I was lonesome, having neither school companions nor many Negro friends. I was an outsider, partly because I could not give friendship and partly because I simply didn’t know how to act – what to say, how to dress, what language to employ. I could find no acceptance among Negroes, and the white world had rejected me, cruelly frustrating my every attempt to belong. I became rebellious and bitter and determined to fight back against this oppressive white world. In later years I was to meet many Negro writers – Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin. The stories they told me about the cruelty they had experienced in childhood, about the viciousness of whites, were in a way as foreign to me as the story of the lynching that my father – an editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer – had printed. Read more: When white strikers abducted black workers on a Seattle streetcar

Nothing so very terrible had happened to me. When I was young, children of the neighborhood had not played with me; a woman had sent me home when she had found me shooting off firecrackers with her daughter; a high school principal had not let me dance with a white girl – none of this seemed to amount to much when compared to their experiences. Yet I had developed the same cornered-rat psychology. The explanation for my feelings, for my fears and hatreds, perhaps lay in the fact that, in spite of its many advantages, my home had been one where both my parents had come from the Deep South. Despite their apparent adjustment, their Southern fears had had more influence on my personality than either they or I could be aware. Possibly, in their frenzied efforts to surmount the color barrier, they somehow failed to teach me what to expect or how to act as a Negro in a white world. Race prejudice was spreading in Seattle at that time, and many restaurants that had previously served Negroes now began to refuse them service; for some reason my estrangement from the Negro group turned me into its self-appointed champion. When I heard that the Strand Theater, a motion picture house on Second Avenue, was insisting on seating all Negroes in the balcony, I forced myself on unwilling feet to a test. I was accompanied by a Negro friend, but he left me at the door, refusing to participate in my war against segregation.

I seated myself downstairs. The manager asked me to leave, and when I refused, he called the police. I was arrested and taken to jail. At the police station the desk sergeant, an elderly man with white hair, routinely asked, “What’s your name?” “Cayton.” “The newspaper editor’s son? Well, I didn’t expect to see his son in trouble. What’s the charge?” “They wouldn’t let me downstairs because I was colored,” I answered hotly. “So I sat there anyway, and they had me arrested.”

“Let the boy use the phone to call his father,” the sergeant said to one of his officers. I got Dad on the phone and told him what had happened. He said he was coming right down, so I sat in a chair in the booking office and awaited his arrival. When he walked into the police station, he was greeted by the sergeant, who turned out to be an old friend. “How are you, Jim?” Dad said. “I’ve come for my boy.” “There he is. Take him home and tell him to be more careful in the future.”

“I’ll tell him to obey the law, like I’ve always told him,” Dad said. “But according to his story on the phone, Jim, he’s broken no law.” Read more: Seattle’s first black cop meets a killer over checkers “Perhaps you’re right, Cayton, but you know as well as I do that things have changed around town. It’s not my fault and it’s not yours. It’s not like it was years ago, when you and I were pioneers in this town. Anyway, teach your boy a little patience. Things have changed, Cayton.” “I know they have, Jim,” Dad replied. “But there’s no law that says where a man should sit in a theater in Seattle. We’ll change when the law does, but we’ll fight any law that takes away our rights. Come on, son. Good night, Jim.” As we walked out of the station, Dad said, “Let’s walk home. I want to talk to you, and a walk will do us good.”