When Ella Fountain Pratt moved to Durham in 1940 with her husband Lanier, she needed a job to support them — Lanier was a graduate student at Duke. By chance, Lanier scored Ella a job interview when he befriended a woman on a bus. Ella recounted in a 1984 interview on WUNC-TV’s North Carolina People that the woman said about her: “Maybe we can use her at the YWCA.”
Pratt got the job, and her experience at the YWCA – with its diverse mix of people—was invaluable to Pratt in cementing her roots to the area. There, working in programs for “young professional women,” Pratt said: “I got to know Durham how I had never known Durham.”
Her passion as a community organizer included the arts, and Pratt got a job in 1956 at Duke developing arts programs for the student union. She eventually became the director of Duke’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
The arts had been a passion of Pratt’s from a young age, when she participated in theater and dance at the Mississippi State College for Women, in Columbus, Mo. (now Mississippi University for Women).
She has described herself as being a child of the depression. “I have said as bad as the depression was, it was the greatest thing that ever happened, because I was a spoiled brat,” she said. “It’s given me a better way of interpreting events to young people.”
At Duke she brought in a range of artists, including violinist Itzhak Perlman, folk singer Pete Seeger and opera singer Leontyne Price.
She retired from Duke in 1984; from Duke she went to the Durham Arts Council, where she helped create the Emerging Artists Program, which gives grants to artists.
Pratt died in 2008 at 94 in Durham.
