Betty Reid Soskin, who served as the nation’s oldest park ranger and related firsthand accounts of segregation as a Black woman on the World War II home front, has died. She was 104.
According to a statement by her family posted on social media, Ms. Soskin died Sunday at her home in Richmond, California. It did not specify a cause.
“She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave,” her family said.
Ms. Soskin, who joined the National Park Service at 85 and retired when she turned 100, used her role as the nation’s oldest park ranger to share the untold stories of Black women, including herself, who served on the home front during World War II.
At that time, she worked as a file clerk at Boilermakers Local Auxiliary 36, a segregated union for Black workers. According to the union, Ms. Soskin worked at the sprawling Kaiser Shipyards, where thousands of women helped construct some 700 Liberty and Victory ships.
While many were familiar with tales of the women who worked in factories as men went off to fight — known as “Rosie the Riveters” — a key detail was often omitted from those histories.
“That was always a White women’s story,” Ms. Soskin said in an interview with The Washington Post in 2015. For most of the war, she said, Black women were not permitted to be “Rosies” until 1944, when some began to be trained as welders.
In 2016, the union apologized to Ms. Soskin for the way she and other Black workers were relegated by the union to an auxiliary segregated lodge during the war. “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,” said union leader IP Jones.
“I’m not trained as a historian. My presentations are based on my oral history,” Ms. Soskin said. “A bottomless well of memories come up depending on questions the public asks. [The memories] are always on tap for me,” she added.
The ranger spent her days sharing her experiences with visitors to the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond. “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.”
Born Betty Charbonnet, Ms. Soskin was born in Detroit on Sept. 22, 1921,and grew up in a Cajun-Creole, African American family in New Orleans. In 1927, after a devastating flood hit the city, her family relocated to Oakland, California, according to a Park Service biography.
In 1945, Ms. Soskin and her husband, Mel Reid, opened one of the country’s first Black-owned music stores, Reid’s Records, which operated until 2019. According to her former employer, she later went into local and state politics, working as an aide to a Berkeley City Council member and for State Assembly members.
Ms. Soskin was working in Richmond as a field representative for a California assemblyman when she met with Park Service planners to discuss the development of an urban park paying tribute to World War II home front workers. In 2003, she left her state job to become a consultant to the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park and four years later, at the age of 85, became a park ranger.
In a statement on social media, the park paid tribute to Ms. Soskin’s time as a ranger: “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.”
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