Late Betty Reid Soskin, author, activist and park ranger, celebrated

OAKLAND — Activist, writer, musician, trailblazer — all are words used to describe the late Betty Reid Soskin, the country’s oldest active National Park Service ranger, whose life was celebrated by loved ones and admirers Sunday.

Park ranger hats lined the stage of the Calvin Simmons Theater in Oakland’s Henry J. Kaiser Center for the Arts, where more than 1,000 people gathered in honor of Soskin, who died at age 104 on Dec. 21.

Fame came to Soskin when she became a park ranger at age 85, a role she held for 15 years working at the Rosie the Riveter World War II/Home Front National Historic Park. Before taking on that job, Soskin helped influence the stories told there as a field representative to two congressmembers, ensuring the museum also reflected the lived experiences of Black and Asian Americans at the time.

“We at the park knew we were incredibly blessed to have Betty, and we never took her for granted,” said Kelli English, Soskin’s former supervisor at the museum. “Thanks to Betty, we have learned to lean into and seek out the hidden stories that go beyond the popular narrative.”

Born in Detroit on Sept. 22, 1921, and christened Betty Charbonnet, Soskin was raised in East Oakland, surrounded by family who had traveled west years before other African Americans made the same migration during World War II.

Like Soskin, the Town was also still growing into its own at the time. The three-bedroom home she lived in with eight others was surrounded by swampy wetlands, and the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport was just a hangar or two, according to Soskin’s autobiography “Sign My Name to Freedom,” which drew from her blog CBreaux Speaks.

Much of what Soskin witnessed and experienced throughout her century-long life was documented in her blog, from the rapid growth of Richmond during World War II and the Port Chicago munitions explosion of 1944 that claimed more than 250 lives, many Black servicemen, to the Civil Rights Movement and more modern political turmoil.

“My life profoundly changed after my time with Betty and she inspired me to continue working on making sure that untold stories continue to get shared in places where they had been forgotten or silenced in the past,” said Tom Leatherman, the superintendent of Pearl Harbor National Memorial and former superintendent of the Rosie the Riveter World War II/Home Front National Historic Park.

Music was also a throughline of Soskin’s life. She grew up surrounded by it, her father and grandfather being musicians. It flowed in and out of the Berkeley record shop she opened and ran with her first husband, Melvin Reid. It’s cataloged in videos and on tapes of her performing her own songs, and is believed to have been the oldest record shop in California.

Archived video spliced with more recent footage of Soskin performing some of her music was played during Sunday’s celebration to great applause, as was a video of former President Barack Obama wishing Soskin a happy 100th birthday.

Soskin didn’t set out to make history. As expected of women of her time, Soskin believed she’d get married, bear children and keep home, according to her autobiography. She did marry, first to Reid and then to Dr. William Soskin, a psychology professor at the UC Berkeley, and raised four children, Rick, Bob, Diara and Dorian.

But Soskin was inevitably pulled toward community organizing.

Her political awakening came while working as a file clerk for a segregated shipyard workers union auxiliary in Richmond, where she learned people, including some she knew, were being flagged when applying for jobs due to perceived ties to communism, she wrote.

Soskin quit her job with the U.S. Air Force after she was transferred to a department where people of color were not allowed to work, and it was revealed she was Black, therefore preventing her from moving up the ranks despite being qualified, according to her autobiography.

“I walked out of the U.S. government and told them to shove it, and that was the end of that,” Soskin wrote in her book.

Determined to never work under a White person again, Soskin and Reid opened Reid’s Records in 1945 in the garage of the duplex they purchased in Berkeley. The music shop specialized in African American music and eventually became a hub for community organizing. During speaking engagements, Soskin would recount how she recruited drug dealers who hung out near the record store to do voter registration.

Deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Soskin joined the Mount Diablo Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where she felt welcomed by its progressive politics and social action, her son Bob said. She helped raise funds for the Black Panther Party in the 1970s and wrote and performed protest songs about racism, social justice and war.

Soskin and her work have been widely celebrated. She was awarded a presidential medal from President Barack Obama in 2015 and was among Glamour Magazine’s 2018 Women of the Year honorees.

Her likeness, donning her park ranger uniform, has been painted into a mural on Richmond’s 23rd Street, and her name graces a school building in the West Contra Costa Unified School District.

The community also helped raise nearly $70,000 through 970 donations to cover Soskin’s medical costs after she experienced a stroke while working at the visitor center in 2019.

“You know, my mother, her death was an accomplishment. My mother wanted to be gone for a while. She wanted to go, she was ready to go, and she went. My mother (squeezed) out all the life there was in that body,” said Soskin’s son Robert Reid. “This is for Ms. Betty.”