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Overlooked No More: Elizabeth Peratrovich, Rights Advocate for Alaska Natives

Peratrovich and her husband rallied Natives to ensure the passage of the 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act, the first anti-discrimination law in the United States.

Credit...Alaska State Archives

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

It was hardly the first affront. They had grown up in a segregated Alaska: separate schools, hospitals, theaters, restaurants and cemeteries. But for Elizabeth Peratrovich and her husband, Roy, Tlingit natives, the sign they spotted one day in late 1941 in Douglas, just across the channel from downtown Juneau, was the final straw.

“No Natives Allowed” read the notice on a hotel door.

“The proprietor of Douglas Inn does not seem to realize that our Native boys are just as willing as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom that he enjoys,” they wrote in a letter to Ernest Gruening, the territory’s governor, signaling the start of their campaign to fight discrimination in Alaska.

Calling such open bias “an outrage,” the couple continued, “We will still be here to guard our beloved country while hordes of uninterested whites will be fleeing South.”

Gruening agreed with the Peratroviches, and they joined forces. In 1943, they attempted to usher an antidiscrimination bill through Alaska’s two-branch Territorial Legislature. It failed, with a tie vote of 8-8 in the House.

In the two years that followed, the Peratroviches redoubled their efforts, urging Native Alaskans to campaign for seats in the Legislature and taking their cause on the road to gain support. They even left their children in the care of an orphanage for a summer so that they could travel across the state more freely.

By the time the new bill reached the Senate floor, on Feb. 5, 1945, Congress had increased the size of the territory’s Legislature, two Natives had been elected to it, and Alaska’s House had already approved the bill. Though the odds of passage were high, the bill set off hours of passionate debate and drew so many onlookers that the crowd spilled out of the gallery doors.

Senator Allen Shattuck argued that the measure would “aggravate rather than allay” racial tensions.

“Who are these people, barely out of savagery, who want to associate with us whites with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind us?” he was quoted as saying in Gruening’s 1973 autobiography, “Many Battles.”

When the floor was opened to public comments, Peratrovich set down her knitting needles and rose from her seat in the back.

Taking the podium, she said: “I would not have expected that I, who am barely out of savagery, would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization behind them of our Bill of Rights.”

She gave examples of the injustices that she and her family had faced because of their background and called on the lawmakers to act. “You as legislators,” she said, “can assert to the world that you recognize the evil of the present situation and speak your intent to help us overcome discrimination.”

Her testimony, The Daily Alaska Empire wrote, shamed the opposition into a “defensive whisper.”

The gallery broke out in a “wild burst of applause,” Gruening wrote. The 1945 Anti-Discrimination Act was passed, 11-5.

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Peratrovich and others on Feb. 16, 1945, with Ernest Gruening, Alaska’s governor, as he signed legislation that entitled all Alaskans to “full and equal enjoyment” of public establishments. Feb. 16 is now celebrated in Alaska as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.Credit...Alaska State Library, Alaska Territorial Governors Collection

Gruening signed the bill into law on Feb. 16 — a date now celebrated by the state each year. The legislation entitled all Alaskans to “full and equal enjoyment” of public establishments, setting a misdemeanor penalty for violators. It also banned discriminatory signage based on race.

It was the first antidiscrimination act in the United States. It would be nearly 20 years before the federal Civil Rights Act would be passed, in 1964, and 14 years before Alaska would become a state.

In 2020, the United States Mint will commemorate Peratrovich on a $1 coin. A gallery of the Alaska House of Representatives has been named in her honor, and a bronze bust sculpted by her son Roy Jr. adorns the lobby of the State Capitol.

And yet, aside from her lauded speech, “most people know very little about her,” said Annie Boochever, whose biography, “Fighter in Velvet Gloves,” written with Roy Peratrovich Jr., was published this year.

“My mother was determined to stand her ground, but she would always do it with grace and dignity,” Roy Jr. wrote in the introduction.

She was born on July 4, 1911, in Petersburg, in what was then the District of Alaska, the daughter of a Native woman and her mother’s Irish brother-in-law. The two left her in the care of the Salvation Army, and she was adopted by Andrew Wanamaker, a Presbyterian minister, and his wife, Jean, a basket weaver. Wanamaker was a charter member of the Alaska Native Brotherhood, a nonprofit organization formed to address racism.

Elizabeth grew up speaking Tlingit and English and living at a subsistence level with her parents in Sitka, a coastal city in the archipelago of southeast Alaska. When she was 10, the family moved more than 100 miles further southeast to Klawock, a Native village on Prince of Wales Island. There she met her future husband, the son of a fisherman from the Balkans, and a Tlingit woman. Though they had attended separate boarding schools, they both graduated from the public high school in Ketchikan, about 70 miles east of Klawock. The school had been integrated after a Tlingit leader successfully sued the school board.

They married in 1931 and returned to Klawock, where Roy Peratrovich worked as a policeman, a chief clerk and a postmaster. He then served as the village mayor for four terms. He was also a member and grand president of the Alaska Native Brotherhood.

Elizabeth raised their children, Roy Jr., Frank Allen and Loretta Marie. She loved to dance and enjoyed watching wrestling on television; she knew all of Gorgeous George’s moves and often yelled at the screen as she watched.

“Dad just looked at me and said, ‘That’s your mother,’ ” Roy Jr. said in an interview. “We laughed.”

In 1941, the Peratroviches moved hundreds of miles north to bustling Juneau, the capital of what was by then the Alaska Territory, to play a larger role in regional politics. By the time Elizabeth was elected grand president of the Alaska Native Sisterhood, a counterpart to the Brotherhood, in 1944, Roy was leading the Brotherhood.

Together they would lay a civil rights framework for future generations, said Paulette Moreno, the Sisterhood’s current grand president.

She likened their efforts to “house posts,” the often beautifully carved structures upon which a traditional Tlingit house stands. Yet, she said, “The shelter is not solid or complete because we witness discrimination and harassment in our communities today. But Elizabeth and Roy have given us role models.”

In 1954, Roy Peratrovich accepted a position with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs and moved the family to Oklahoma. But when Elizabeth learned in 1956 that she had breast cancer, they returned to Juneau. Once her illness worsened, she entered a Christian Science care center in Seattle, where Roy Jr. was attending college.

She died on Dec. 1, 1958, at 47.

She was buried in the shade of a Sitka spruce in Juneau’s Evergreen Cemetery, beside a plot reserved for her husband, who died in 1989.

Every year, a groundskeeper opens the bollards that block street access to the grave for one day, on Feb. 16 — Elizabeth Peratrovich Day.

A correction was made on 
March 22, 2019

An earlier version of this obituary misstated where Peratrovich's husband's father was from. He was from the Balkans, but not from Yugoslavia, which became a nation some years after he was born. It also misstated the location of the Douglas Inn. It was in Douglas, just across the channel from downtown Juneau, not in Juneau.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Elizabeth Peratrovich. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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