Betty Reed Soskin, who gained national fame as the National Park Service’s oldest ranger and spoke about her experiences with racial discrimination on the home front in World War II, has died. She was 104 years old.
Soskin passed away Sunday morning at his home in Richmond, California, surrounded by his family.
“She had lived a full life and was ready to leave,” her family said.
Soskin, 85, was hired as a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Homefront National Historical Park, where she elevated the stories of women from diverse backgrounds who served in the civil war.
By the time she retired in 2022 at age 100, she had become a national figure, attracting attention and requests for interviews at her age.
According to , Soskin grew up in a Cajun-Creole African-American family who settled in Oakland after their New Orleans home was destroyed in the historic flood of 1927. She was 6 years old when she arrived in East Oakland.
Her parents joined her maternal grandfather, who resettled in a Bay Area city at the end of World War I.
Her grandfather’s family “followed the pattern set by black railroad workers who discovered the West Coast while working as sleeping car porters, waiters, and chefs on the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe Railroads, settling at the western terminus where life would be less affected by Southern hostilities,” the biography says.
Soskin’s great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, was born into slavery in Louisiana and was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. (Soskin had a photo of Allen tucked into her breast pocket when she watched President Barack Obama’s inauguration on the Capitol Mall in 2009.)
During World War II, Soskin took a job as a file clerk at the boilermakers’ union hall in Richmond. Her position was at Kaiser Shipyards, where thousands of women helped build more than 700 Liberty and Victory ships, the union said.
But Soskin’s history differs from the powerful image of “Rosie the Riveter,” the bicep-flexing 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 educational talk.
Soskin said the union hall was segregated.
The union acknowledged racial discrimination.
In a talk titled “On Lost Conversations,” Soskin reflected on his disappointment with the Park Service’s film about the wartime effort in Richmond.
She said the filmmakers adopted a “Hollywood ending” in which “everyone comes together for democracy and puts aside their differences.”
The reality was even harsher. It took about a decade for the labor movement to become racially integrated, with black workers “displaced,” Soskin said, and unions creating workplaces called auxiliary organizations.
“Jim Crow” — a term referring to laws and customs that enforced a racial caste system — “was actually another name for subsidy,” Soskin said.
But, she added, “even back then” in 1942, “it was a step forward.”
Working as a clerk, she says, “would have been the equivalent of being the first young woman of color in her family to attend college today.”
Time has moved on. After raising four children as a “suburban housewife,” Soskin became a field representative for two California congressmen, Dion Aroner and Loni Hancock. In that capacity, she helped plan the national park where she would eventually work.
She also partnered with the Park Service on a grant-funded effort to uncover the untold stories of Black men and women who served in the interior during the war, which led to her taking a temporary position with the Park Service at age 84. A year later, he assumed the permanent position.
“Being a primary source in sharing that history, my history, and shaping a new national park is exciting and rewarding,” Soskin said. “It proved to bring meaning to my later years.”
Soskin’s pioneering work went beyond his work with the Park Service.
(In 1945, Soskin and her then-husband Mel Reed opened one of the first black-owned music stores in Berkeley, California. The store remained open for more than 70 years and served as a center for gospel music. (Soskin divorced Reed and went on to marry William Soskin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.)
Soskin is a singer-songwriter herself, documenting her journey through the 1960s and 1970s. Her reunion with music is the subject of an ongoing documentary.
It was in 2013 that Soskin rose to the national stage and became a media darling, notable for his age during the government shutdown, according to the Park Service.
Two years later, Soskin was selected by the station to participate in the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony, where she introduced President Obama on a special PBS program.
She suffered a stroke in 2019 but returned to work in early 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
In announcing her death, the Park Service praised Soskin as a “pioneering” employee.
“Betty had a tremendous impact on the National Park Service and the way we carry out our mission,” former Park Service Director Charles “Chuck” Sams said upon his retirement. “Her efforts remind us that we must explore and give space to all perspectives so that we can tell a more complete and inclusive history of this country.”
Mr. Soskin’s survivors include three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
To honor her, her family suggests donations be made to Betty Reed Soskin Middle School and .
