Today, February 16, is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. Long before Martin Luther King Jr. led the battle for civil rights in the United States, Elizabeth Peratrovich, a Tlingit woman from Southeast Alaska, helped lead the effort to pass civil rights legislation in our state.
It was a speech made by Peratrovich to the Territorial Legislature that prompted Alaska lawmakers to pass the Territory's Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, which was the first anti-discrimination law in the United States. Before then, it was legal to discriminate against Alaska Natives; it took almost another 20 years for the federal government to do the same.
Today, by legislative statute, the state honors her memory and the leadership that Peratrovich and the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska Native Sisterhood provided, long before Alaska achieved statehood.