Betty Reid Soskin, who gained national acclaim as the National Park Service’s oldest ranger and shared her experience of racial discrimination serving on the home front in World War II, has died. He was 104 years old.
Soskin passed away Sunday morning at his home in Richmond, California surrounded by family.
“She lived a full life and is ready to go,” her family wrote on social media.
At age 85, Soskin was hired as a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park, where she raised the stories of women from diverse backgrounds who joined the war struggle.
By the time he retires in 2022 at the age of 100, he is still a national figure, known for his age and in demand for interviews.
Soskin grew up in a Cajun-Creole African American family that settled in Oakland after a historic flood destroyed their home in New Orleans in 1927, according to. His Park Service history. He was 6 years old when he came to East Oakland.
His parents joined his maternal grandfather, who had resettled in the Bay Area city at the end of World War I.
His grandfather’s family “followed the pattern set by the Black railroad workers who discovered the West Coast while working as sleeping car porters, waiters and cooks for the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads: They settled west where they ran where life might be less affected by the enmity of the South,” the history reads.
Soskin’s grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, was born into slavery in Louisiana and freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. (Soskin had a photo of Allen tucked in his breast pocket when he watched President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration on the Capitol Mall.)
During World War II, Soskin got a job as a file clerk at a boilermaker’s union hall in Richmond. Her position was at Kaiser Shipyards, where thousands of women helped build more than 700 Liberty and Victory ships, according to the union.
But Soskin’s history is separated from the empowering image of “Rosie the Riveter,” the flexing bicep symbol of millions of American women who worked in factories and shipyards during the war. Rosie the Riveter was “a white woman’s story,” she said in a recorded lecture.
The union hall was segregated, according to Soskin.
The union acknowledged the racial discrimination and gave him an award decades later.
In the speech, “For Lost Conversations,” Soskin expresses his dismay at the Park Service film made of the wartime effort in Richmond.
The filmmakers, he said, went with “the Hollywood ending,” where, “[w]let us all come together for the sake of democracy and put aside our differences.”
The truth was hard. It was nearly a decade before the labor movement was racially integrated, and unions created what were known as auxiliaries, workplaces where, Soskin says, black workers were “discarded.”
“Jim Crow” — the name for the laws and customs that enforced the system of racial segregation — “was certainly not another word for help,” Soskin said.
By 1942, however, his role was “on the rise,” he added.
Working as a clerk “would be equivalent to today’s black woman who is the first in her family to go to college,” she said.
Time went on. After raising four children as a “suburban housewife,” Soskin went on to represent two California legislators – Dion Aroner and Loni Hancock. In that capacity, he helped organize the park where he would eventually work.
He also collaborated with the Park Service on a grant-funded effort to uncover the untold stories of Black men and women who served on the home front during the war, which led to a temporary position with the agency when he was 84. A permanent position followed a year later.
“Being the primary source in sharing that history — my history — and making the state of a new national park so exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said in a statement the year he retired. “It proved to bring meaning to my last years.”
“Rosie the Riveter” was a symbol of women in non-traditional occupations during the Second World War. Betty Reid Soskin described the cultural icon as “a white woman’s story.”
(Ben Margot/AP)
Soskin’s pursuit of trails extended beyond his career in the Park Service.
In 1945, Soskin and her then-husband, Mel Reid, opened one of the first black-owned music stores in Berkeley, Calif., which remained in business for more than 70 years and served as a gospel music venue. (Soskin would divorce Reid and go on to marry UC Berkeley professor William Soskin.)
Soskin himself was a singer-songwriter, recounting his journey through the 1960s and 1970s. His reconnection with music is the subject of an ongoing documentary, “Sign My Name to Freedom.”
It was in 2013 that Soskin reached the national stage, becoming the media darling of his age during the government shutdown, according to the Park Service.
Two years later, Soskin was selected by the agency to participate in the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony, where he introduced President Obama in a PBS special.
He suffered a stroke in 2019, but returned to work in early 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
In a social media post announcing his death, the Park Service praised Soskin as an “outstanding” employee.
“Betty had a huge impact on the National Park Service and the way we do our work,” said Charles “Chuck” Sams, former Park Service director, upon his retirement. “His efforts remind us that we need to seek out and provide a universal perspective so that we can tell a full and inclusive history of our nation.”
In her honor, her family suggests that she make a donation to the Betty Reid Soskin School and to support the completion of a documentary about his music.
