January 26, 1969: The Murder of Edwin Pratt

The surge of assassinations of leaders of the civil rights and black liberation movements in the late 1960s cast a wide enough net across the United States that it was bound to reach Seattle eventually. It did so on the date in focus here, when Edwin T. Pratt was shot to death in the doorway of his home on a snowy Sunday night.

Pratt was the executive director of the Seattle Urban League, a member of the Central Area Civil Rights Organization, and a respected and effective leader in the struggle for integrated housing and education in Seattle. Housing discrimination and de facto school segregation were widespread when he arrived in Seattle in 1956. Through his leadership, the League's staff grew from five to 25, and he became the Seattle chapter's executive director in 1961.

Pratt's effectiveness as a devoted integrationist in a profoundly white city proved fatal when, opening the front door of his home in Shoreline to investigate a disturbance outside, he was shot directly in the face by one of two unknown persons, who then quickly fled the scene. Witnesses, including Pratt's wife Bettye, reported seeing two men, both in their late teens or early twenties, fleeing into a nearby car, which immediately sped away. All assumed that a third person was involved as the driver of the getaway car. Due to the darkness, none of the witnesses was able to tell whether Pratt's killers were white or black.

While a formal investigation was quickly launched by the King County Sheriff's Department in collaboration with the FBI, and a reward of $10,500 was offered by local business leaders, after several months the crime remained unsolved. The reward was cancelled in January 1970 and the case was effectively abandoned until 1994, when freelance journalist David Newman took an interest in the case and requested that the relevant police files be released under the Public Disclosure Act. King County officials intriguingly claimed exemption from the Act for police investigative files, and granted only a partial release of the files requested by Newman, while withholding several key documents, including interviews with suspects. After a long legal battle, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in November 1997 that the Pratt files should remain closed so long as the King County Police Department deemed it necessary.

Much intrigue beyond the scope of this column still surrounds the Pratt murder case. While many in Seattle's black community--including and especially Pratt's surviving colleagues--have long suspected police involvement with Pratt's murder, to this day the crime remains officially unsolved. Pratt's legacy remains with us today physically and civically in the form of Pratt Park and the Pratt Fine Arts Center, both located in the Central Area and named in his honor in the late 1970s.

Sources: HistoryLink.org; Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times archives; Stranger archives