Google honors Elizabeth Peratrovich.
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Google dedicated its Doodle Wednesday to Elizabeth Peratrovich, an Alaskan civil rights activist who was instrumental in creating the first US anti-discrimination law. The Doodle marks the day in 1941 that Peratrovich and her husband began their campaign to end discrimination in Alaska with a letter to the Territory Governor against a sign on a hotel door in Juneau, Alaska that read “No Natives Allowed” protested.
Peratrovich, a member of the Alaskan Tlingit tribe, was born in 1911, a time of rampant segregation in the territory. She was adopted after being orphaned at a young age and attended college in Bellingham, Washington.
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She married in 1931 and 10 years later she and her husband Roy moved with their three children to Juneau, where they faced discrimination while trying to secure housing and gain access to public places. They asked the state to ban the “No dogs or natives allowed” signs that were customary at the time.
“The owner of Douglas Inn doesn’t seem to realize that our local boys are as ready as the white boys to lay down their lives to protect the freedom he enjoys,” they wrote in a letter to Ernest Gruening, the governor of the Territory.
The governor agreed and teamed up with the Peratrovichs to pass an anti-discrimination law, but their first attempt failed in 1943. They fought on for the next two years, and when a second bill reached the Senate in 1945, Elizabeth Peratrovich stood on the podium as the floor opened for public comment.
“I did not expect that, hardly out of wildness, I would have to remind the gentlemen with 5,000 years of recorded civilization of our Bill of Rights,” she said, causing the gallery to burst into wild applause.
After years of trying to pass an anti-discrimination law in the state, the Peratrovichs saw the passage of the Alaskan Anti-Discrimination Law of 1945, nearly 20 years before Congress passed the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In 1988, the Alaska Legislature established February 16, 1945, the day the law was signed, as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day to honor “her courageous, relentless efforts to eradicate discrimination and achieve equality in Alaska.”
Elizabeth Peratrovich died in 1958 at the age of 47 after battling breast cancer.
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