"Education is the reason I have success. It’s open to everybody, but you have to be motivated to take advantage of it."

"When I took the bus from South Carolina to New York in my teens, I wore an outfit, including the blouse, given to me by the local undertaker. Now when I look into my closet, I see success," says Frances Pratt '73, a nursing graduate who has worked for Nyack Hospital since 1959, now as Manager of Employee Health Services.

One of ten children, Pratt recalls growing up in the South so poor they could barely go outside in the wintertime because they didn't have shoes. But what Pratt did have was a mother who taught her to "defer honor to others, because then the honors will eventually be returned to you."

Pratt had once dreamed of becoming a missionary to Africa, and studied religious education in North Carolina. But when her mother became ill, Pratt left school to work. She moved to New York, where she could earn $40 a week in a nursery school rather than $3 a week doing laundry down south. Pratt met husband-to-be, Marshall Pratt, and moved to his hometown of South Nyack. She soon enrolled in RCC's nursing program, finding that nursing seemed the ideal profession because it fit in with her passion to help people. She recalls hearing from her social science professor the most positive statement she had heard about race relations since moving to New York, "Before we get started, I want to make it clear there is no pure specimen in humankind today."

For 28 years, Pratt has served as President of the Nyack branch of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Her desire to combat injustice was born during her childhood in the South. "I walked into an ice-cream parlor with my mother and the clerk said, 'You can buy the ice-cream, but you have eat it outside.' I had never seen my mother demeaned in that way. If she had spoken up, the clerk would have called the police. As I got older and thought about that experience and others, I prayed that one day I could do something to improve race relations."

Pratt's civil rights work earned her the 1986 Heroine Award from the national NAACP, and in 2003, she was inducted into the Rockland County Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Nyack Hospital named its emergency room lobby and a scholarship after Pratt and planted a Peace Rose Garden in her honor. At the dedication of the garden, Pratt joked, "What I appreciate most about this recognition is that it is not about the late Frances Ethel Powell Pratt. I can actually read the plaque and smell the roses!"

Pratt is now the widow of the late Marshall Pratt, still resides in South Nyack, has a daughter and three grandchildren. She is known for her dramatic hats, which she wears "because I have Victorian blood in my background, and this is how I show it!"

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