Betty Reid Soskin, who rose to national fame as the oldest National Park Service ranger and used the spotlight to talk about the African American experience during World War II, has died. She was 104. Her family and the park service announced Soskin's death on social media, the AP reports, saying she was surrounded by loved ones at her home in California when she died Sunday. "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. Thank you for your service, Ranger Betty," the park service said in a statement.
At 85, the community activist was hired as an interpretive ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California. The site at a former shipyard and other parts of the working-class city honor civilians who worked on the homefront during the war. Soskin helped plan the park while a state legislative aide. She played a key role in shaping and designing the park by ensuring that it included the contributions of Black men and women. They include the 202 Black sailors who were killed in the July 1944 explosion at Port Chicago, on the northeastern flank of San Francisco Bay, where they were assigned to a segregated unit, loading munitions onto cargo ships bound for the Pacific Theater. Unsafe working conditions led 50 survivors of the blast to refuse to load munitions. They were court-martialed and convicted of mutiny in a trial that exposed systemic racial inequality in the Navy.
As a clerk for the all-Black boilermaker's union in Richmond, Soskin advocated for telling the stories of the women who didn't get to help build the battleships because of the color of their skin. "Rosie the Riveter represents the white woman's experience on the homefront during the war, but as a woman of color, I was never recognized for my work," she wrote in an October 2020 essay for Newsweek. Those who met Soskin during visits to the park took to social media Monday to say it was an honor and that she was an amazing woman. One described her as a jewel of the park system, while others said she served as an inspiration for young rangers.
Her family recounted Soskin's many roles: mother, daughter, musician, author, political activist, wife, record store owner, songwriter, painter, grandmother, great-grandmother, and prolific blogger. She led "a fully packed life and was ready to leave," the family posted online. In 1995, Soskin was named Woman of the Year by the California Legislature, and she later received the National WWII Museum's Silver Service Medallion. She wrote her She wrote her autobiography in 2018, Sign My Name to Freedom: A Memoir of a Pioneering Life. At the park, her weekly lectures drew large audiences. They also garnered national attention, including the chance to introduce then-President Barack Obama at the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in 2015. In 2008, Glamour magazine named her one of its women of the year. "I became a ranger when most people retire so I had no idea what it required of me, but it opened up a lot of opportunities that would have been closed to me otherwise," she wrote in her essay. She retired in March 2022.
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