Betty Reid Soskin helped create Rosie the Riveter park and worked until age 100 despite facing lifelong discrimination
Betty Reid Soskin, who became the National Park Service’s oldest active ranger and spent decades ensuring that overlooked stories of discrimination during World War II received proper recognition, died Sunday at her home in Richmond, California. She was 104 years old.
Her family confirmed the death in a statement posted on her social media account, marking the end of a remarkable life that spanned more than a century of American history and witnessed transformative change in civil rights and social justice.
A wartime experience shaped by discrimination
In 1942, as women across America joined the defense industry workforce immortalized in Rosie the Riveter posters, Soskin attempted to contribute to the war effort in the Bay Area. She sought employment through the boilermakers’ union, which supplied much of the shipbuilding workforce in the port of Richmond near San Francisco.
However, the segregated union relegated Soskin and other Black women to its auxiliary wing, preventing them from working in the shipyards alongside white women. For the duration of the war, she sorted index cards at the union hall in the city, miles away from the bustling yards that sent warships to the Pacific.
The experience left her with profound feelings of humiliation and disconnection from the war effort she desperately wanted to support. She told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007 that she never had a sense of being anyone other than someone pushing papers, admitting she wasn’t even always sure who the enemy was. This painful chapter would later become central to her life’s work ensuring similar stories received proper historical recognition.
Finding purpose in preserving history
Soskin’s wartime experiences gained new relevance in 2000 when she was working as an aide to California Assembly member Dion Aroner. She landed a seat at the planning table for the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, bringing a perspective sorely needed in the development process.
She was the only person of color in the room during those planning sessions. As she began introducing her knowledge of the period, it became clear that many stories about Richmond during the war were not being told. The dominant narrative focused on white women’s contributions while largely ignoring the experiences of people of color who faced discrimination even as they tried to support their country.
The National Park Service made Soskin a consultant to the park in 2003, recognizing the value of her lived experience and historical knowledge. Four years later, when she was 85 years old, she officially joined as a ranger, beginning a second career that would define her legacy and last until she was 100.
Transforming how history gets told
As a ranger, Soskin took visitors on narrated bus trips and shared the history of the park’s numerous sites. She became especially remembered for the talks she gave at the park’s theater, where she recounted the lives of people of color who faced racial discrimination at home during the war.
Tom Leatherman, the park’s superintendent, credited Soskin with fundamentally changing how the institution approached historical interpretation. Because of her influence, the park ensured African American scholars reviewed their films and exhibits. The institution also began actively seeking out other forgotten stories, including Japanese American, Latino American, American Indian and LGBTQ narratives that were equally important to understanding the home front experience.
Beyond her own wartime experiences, Soskin educated visitors about how thousands of Japanese people living on the West Coast, many of them American citizens, had been transported by the government to inland internment camps. These stories complicated the simplified narrative of national unity during the war, revealing the discrimination and injustice that persisted even as Americans fought fascism abroad.
Recognition from the highest levels
Soskin’s work earned recognition from national leaders. In 2009, her congressional representative George Miller invited her as a guest to witness President Barack Obama’s inauguration on the National Mall. Six years later, she introduced Obama during the nationally televised Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Washington, where he presented her with a commemorative coin stamped with the presidential seal.
On that evening in the nation’s capital, Soskin carried in her pocket a photograph of her great-grandmother Leontine Breaux Allen, who was born into slavery. She later reflected on the profound symbolism of that moment, standing with her great-grandmother in her breast pocket alongside the first African American president. She described it as sheer poetry, asking what could be more American than that arc of history.
Early life shaped by resilience
Betty Charbonnet was born September 22, 1921, in Detroit, where her family lived briefly before returning to their home in New Orleans. Her father Dorson Louis Charbonnet worked as a builder like his father before him, while her mother Lottie Breaux Allen came from a family with African, French and Spanish roots.
Following a devastating flood that ravaged their home when Betty was only 6 years old, her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. After graduating from high school, she married Mel Reid, and in 1945 they founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley. The store featured jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel recordings, becoming one of the first Black-owned record shops in California.
While raising their four children in the mostly white Berkeley suburb of Walnut Creek, Soskin and her husband encountered racial hostility and received death threats. The couple persevered despite the dangerous climate, refusing to be driven from their home.
Activism and artistic expression
In the late 1960s, Soskin held fundraisers through the Unitarian Universalist Church to support the Black Panthers, delivering proceeds to Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, two central figures in the organization. She served as a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention that nominated Senator George McGovern to face President Richard Nixon.
Soskin also wrote and performed songs throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sharing them on guitar across the Bay Area. After divorcing Mel Reid in 1972 and a subsequent marriage to Berkeley psychology professor William Soskin that also ended in divorce, she took over management of Reid’s Records in 1978 when her first husband’s health declined.
She worked to revive the store’s fortunes by pressuring Berkeley City Hall to address the drug problem that had overtaken Sacramento Street where the business operated. This advocacy led to positions working for City Council member Don Jelinek and later with Mayor Gus Newport on low-income housing initiatives.
Working past 100 years old
As she approached her 100th birthday, Soskin continued working despite significant health challenges. She returned to her ranger duties after suffering a stroke in 2019, maintaining a reduced schedule via video conference. She also recovered from injuries sustained in 2016 when a burglar attacked her after breaking into her apartment in the middle of the night.
Even when off duty, Soskin devoted herself to wearing her ranger uniform in public spaces. She explained that when she appeared on streets, escalators or elevators, she made every little girl of color aware of a career choice they may not have known they had. The pride was evident in their eyes, she said.
