Alaska's Rosa Parks

Alaska civil rights film premieres in D.C.

By Van WilliamsThe names Alberta Schenck and Elizabeth Peratrovich are not as common as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., but their achievements are just as significant.

Long before the infamous Civil Rights Act of 1964 championed by Parks and King, Schenck and Peratrovich spearheaded an Alaska Native movement that led to the passage of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act, the first of its kind in the United States.

It’s a forgotten movement that doesn’t get the national attention it deserves, according to Anchorage filmmaker Jeff Silverman. So he made a documentary telling their remarkable story called, “For the Rights of All: Ending Jim Crow in Alaska.”

The film will air on Public Broadcasting System TV next month.What exactly did Schenck and Peratrovich do?It was Schenck, who as a defiant Native teenager, was arrested in 1944 for refusing to give up her seat in a whites-only section of a Nome movie theater—11 years before Parks famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Alabama.

It was Peratrovich’s passionate testimony to the Alaska territorial Senate in 1945 that reportedly swayed Gov. Ernest Gruening to sign the equal rights bill into law—18 years before King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.Comment:  For more on the subject, see Native Documentaries and News.