A National Park Service ranger who came to the job at a spry 85 has died at the age of 104.
Betty Reid Soskin was the agency’s oldest active ranger and, according to The New York Times, “helped shape the creation of a park honoring the millions of workers in World War II defense jobs,” including the Black women who supported the war effort while targeted by racial discrimination.
Her family posted to Facebook that she died at her home in Richmond, California, on Dec. 21, KNTV reported.
He wrote, “She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave.”
Soskin tried to work as part of the Bay Area boilermakers’ union, but the union was segregated, so she and other Black women worked in the group’s auxiliary wing.
She had to sort index cards at the union hall instead of building the ships. She called the work humiliating, the newspaper reported.
“I never had a sense of being anyone other than pushing papers,” Soskin told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. “I wasn’t even always sure who the enemy was.”
But decades after the war, she was able to put her mark on a memorial to all of the women who left their kitchens and worked in defense of the nation.
She was an aide to an assemblywoman in California and helped plan the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in her hometown.
Soskin was the only Black person on the team, she told Newsweek. “As I began to introduce my part of the work, it was very clear that many of the stories of Richmond during the war were not being told,” she explained.
“That was always a white women’s story,” she told The Washington Post in 2015. She said that Black women were not permitted to be “Rosies” until 1944, when some were allowed to be trained as welders.
The union apologized to her and the other Black workers who were forced to serve the union’s auxiliary.
“Black women were not freed or emancipated in the workforce,” she told the Post. “Unions were not racially integrated and wouldn’t be for a decade. They created auxiliaries that all Blacks were dumped into. We paid dues, but didn’t have power or votes.”
“On behalf of my organization, I offer Betty and all former Boilermakers who at one time belonged to an auxiliary local, an apology for what must have been a demeaning life experience,” union leader IP Jones said in 2016, the Post reported.
She was a consultant for the park in 2003 and four years later became a park ranger, telling visitors the history of the park’s sites, and shared the story of Black families who faced discrimination during the war.
Soskin was named Glamour’s woman of the year for her work that had an effect on the stories of not only the Black families but also other races, creeds and colors as well, including the Japanese-Americans who were taken to internment camps.
“We also made sure we were looking out for other, often forgotten stories — Japanese American, Latino American, American Indian, and L.G.B.T.Q. narratives — that were equally important,” Park superintendent Tom Leatherman told the magazine in 2018.
Soskin retired in 2022, KNTV reported.
The park posted a tribute to the ranger, writing, “She was a powerful voice for sharing her personal experiences, highlighting untold stories, and honoring the contributions of women from diverse backgrounds who worked on the World War II Home Front.”
She said of her time telling the untold stories: “I’m not trained as a historian. My presentations are based on my oral history,” Ms. Soskin said, according to the Post. “A bottomless well of memories come up depending on questions the public asks. [The memories] are always on tap for me,” she added.
She never forgot where she and her family came from, carrying a photo of her great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, who was born into slavery, the Times reported.
She was born in Detroit, where her parents lived for a short time before returning to New Orleans. But flooding in the Big Easy forced the family to leave when Soskin was 6, moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. Soskin Mel Reid, after she graduated from high school and created Reid’s Records, one of the first Black-owned record stores in the state.
They raised their family of four children in the mostly white area of Walnut Creek in Berkeley. She said she and her husband were targeted by hostility and even death threats.
She recounted in her memoir an incident from the 1950s that happened as she was eating in a restaurant with three of her children at about 5 p.m.
“After a very long time, the waitress came over,” she recounted, according to the Times. “She announced with a grin, ‘You’ll have to get out of here. We’re closing.’ The rest of the customers had gone silent. Some were also obviously enjoying my misery. It was the dinner hour. The place could not be closing.”
“This was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the establishment of racially shared restrooms and drinking fountains,” she wrote, “but this was not Mississippi, but California. How could this be?,” she wrote.
Eventually, the couple divorced and she married William Soskin, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
She ended up working for the city as a legislative aide to a council mayor after she had pushed the city to do something about the drug problem in her record store.
Soskin leaves behind three children, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild and three nieces, the Times reported.
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