On the battlefield of civil rights, Ed Pratt liked to say, learn to duck. Supporters think you don't do enough, and opponents say you've gone too far. It's life in a crossfire, and the coolly imposing, mustachioed director of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle was living it in 1960s Seattle, where Pratt had become one of the predominately white city's most influential and outspoken black leaders, admired for his sense of humor and ability to find the high middle ground.
King County Sheriff
Pratt met his end at this snowy Shoreline home.
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By the end of the decade, a year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the 38-year-old Pratt pushed hard for school and workplace desegregation, the de-ghettoizing of neighborhoods, and an end to police harassment. He attracted wide, biracial support among moderates. But he'd also united the races in another campaign: Dissenters black and white seemed to be lining up to do him in.
They sent angry letters, left intimidating messages, and got up at public meetings to threaten his life. Pratt's white secretary, who took a lot of the messages, thought some of her boss' fellow African-Americans were the most resentful—the more militant ones sometimes publicly vowed to "eliminate" him. His good work became less important, and he began to worry about his demise, his secretary would later tell investigators.
It didn't help matters that Pratt was also having a secret affair with the secretary (she has asked not to be named here, out of fear for her safety), and had recently gotten up the nerve to ask his wife of 13 years, Bettye, for a divorce. Distraught, Bettye, a dry alcoholic, was drinking again and threatening to kill him if he left her. Ed Pratt's nerves were jangled; he was worn down by conflict at work and home. He'd made up his mind to take a job elsewhere, possibly at Boeing, maybe even overseas. As the girlfriend remembers it, he vowed to marry her and move somewhere out of shouting, if not shooting, distance.
Pratt was supposed to meet his secretary/girlfriend for dinner at her apartment on the night of January 26, 1969. But there'd been a rare heavy Seattle snow that Sunday, and he called her around 8 p.m. to say he'd see her the next day instead. Pratt settled in at home for the night, sitting in his favorite chair, clipping race-related stories from newspapers, as he often did, while watching TV.
Bettye was in a bedroom putting their 5-year-old daughter Miriam down for the night. She and Ed were both Southerners who'd grown up poor in the 1930s—he in Miami, she in Texas. They met in their early 20s while attending Atlanta University, and moved to Seattle after their marriage in 1956, when he became the Urban League's community-relations head. He was named executive director in 1961.
The attractive Bettye, a social worker and sometime alcoholism counselor, supported and worried about her husband. She'd been anxious since she'd received a threatening phone call after Mississippi civil-rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway by a Ku Klux Klan member in 1963. "If Ed doesn't shut up," said the female caller, "he'll end up like Medgar."
Hardly an hour had passed when Ed Pratt heard snowballs hitting the sides of his Shoreline rambler on First Avenue Northeast. The Richmond Highlands neighborhood was white as the outdoors that evening. Pratt, in his slippers, padded to the front door and poked his head out into the cold night. Seeing figures under his driveway's carport, he said, "Who's there?" A shotgun suddenly exploded, the slug tearing through Ed Pratt's mouth and lodging in his neck after glancing off bone, severing his spine. He crumpled to the carpet as Bettye, who'd been looking out the bedroom window, saw the red muzzle flash and shouted, "They've got a rifle!" By then, her husband was already dead.
The figures disappeared into the night. Neighbors who heard the shot saw two young men hop into what some guessed was a 1968 Buick Skylark, driven by a third man. "They looked like kids," said a witness. "It was the way they ran—the gait." No one got a good look at the suspects. Some thought they were white, others said they were black.
In death, Pratt got the undivided attention of his city and its police, suddenly dealing with a Southern-style racial assassination. Words of praise and grief flowed from local and national leaders, including President Richard Nixon, who wrote Bettye Pratt a note of condolence. The rarity of the murder of a black leader in a northern white community moved Nixon to dub Pratt the MLK of the Northwest.
At Pratt's crowded funeral at St. Mark's Cathedral on Capitol Hill, his friend and St. Mark's dean, the Very Reverend John C. Leffler, recalled Pratt's ghetto childhood and wondered if "he had a subconscious knowledge that he had to pack a lot of work into a short time." Whitney Young, national Urban League director, said, "I sense some shame that this could happen here . . . They—the killers—probably came from this environment."
City, county, and federal investigators pored over the scant evidence: the 12-gauge slug taken from Pratt's body, the tire tracks and the footprints in the snow. Over the next few months they would question hundreds of witnesses and suspects. Aides to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell were involved on a daily basis, in part secretly hoping to keep a lid on racial tensions. In a teletype message sent to Hoover and relayed to the Seattle FBI office two days after the shooting, Mitchell wrote, "It has come to my attention that certain black groups are circulating a story to the effect that the death of Pratt was caused by White racists. Does your bureau have any information to the contrary, and, if so, is there any way it might be publicized through local police or otherwise?"
