Betty Reid Soskin, the National Park Service’s oldest active ranger, who helped shape the creation of a park honoring the millions of workers in World War II defense jobs, among them women like her who persevered while facing racial discrimination, died on Sunday at her home in Richmond, Calif. She was 104.
Her death was confirmed in a statement that her family posted on her social media account.
In 1942, when women joined the war effort by working in the defense industry and other related roles, as portrayed in “Rosie the Riveter” posters, Ms. Soskin sought to do her part in the Bay Area by seeking work at the boilermakers’ union, which supplied much of the shipbuilding work force in the port of Richmond, near San Francisco. But the union, which was segregated, relegated her and the other Black women in its ranks to its auxiliary wing.
And so for the rest of the war, Ms. Soskin sorted index cards at the union hall in the city, miles from the bustling yards that sent warships to the Pacific, a task that left her with a feeling of humiliation. “I never had a sense of being anyone other than pushing papers,” she told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007. “I wasn’t even always sure who the enemy was.”
But she was able to draw on her World War II experiences in later years. In 2000, while working as an aide to Dion Aroner, a California assemblywoman, she landed a seat at the table in planning for the launch of the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond.
“I was the only person of color in the room,” Ms. Soskin told Newsweek in 2020. “And 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.”
Ms. Soskin was made a consultant to the park in 2003 and signed on as a ranger there in 2007, when she was 85.
She took visitors on narrated bus trips and shared the history of the park’s many sites, and was remembered especially 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.
“Because of Betty, we made sure we had African American scholars review our films and exhibits,” Tom Leatherman, the park’s superintendent, told Glamour in 2018, when the magazine named Ms. Soskin as woman of the year in the field of culture. “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.”
In addition to her own wartime experiences, Ms. Soskin told of 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.
In 2009, Ms. Soskin was invited by her congressman, George Miller, as a guest on the National Mall to witness President Barack Obama’s inauguration. In 2015, Ms. Soskin introduced Mr. Obama during the nationally televised Christmas tree lighting in Washington, where he presented her with a commemorative coin stamped with the presidential seal.
On that evening, as was often the case, she carried in her pocket a photograph of her great-grandmother, Leontine Breaux Allen, who was born into slavery.
“Here I was with my great-grandmother in my breast pocket and with the first African-American president of the United States,” Ms. Soskin told The New Orleans Times-Picayune. “It was sheer poetry. What could be more American than that?”
Betty Charbonnet was born on Sept. 22, 1921, in Detroit, where her family lived briefly before returning to their home in New Orleans. Her father, Dorson Louis Charbonnet, who, like his father, worked as a builder, and her mother, Lottie Breaux Allen, had African, French and Spanish roots.
Following a devastating flood that ravaged their home, Betty, only 6, and her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.
After graduating from high school, Betty married Mel Reid, and in 1945 they founded Reid’s Records in Berkeley. It featured jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel recordings, and was one of the first Black-owned record shops in California. Mel and his uncle, Paul Reid, became highly successful music promoters.
While raising their four children in the mostly white Berkeley suburb of Walnut Creek, Ms. Soskin and her husband encountered racial hostility and received death threats.
In the late 1960s, Ms. Soskin held fund-raisers through the Unitarian Universalist Church to support the Black Panthers and delivered the proceeds to Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, two of the group’s central figures. She was a delegate to the 1972 Democratic National Convention that nominated Senator George McGovern of South Dakota to face President Richard M. Nixon in what became his election to a second term.
Ms. Soskin also wrote songs in the 1960s and 70s, performing them on her guitar throughout the Bay Area.
Ms. Soskin and Mr. Reid divorced in 1972, and she married William Soskin, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. That marriage also ended in divorce. She took over management of Reid’s Records in 1978 after her first husband’s health declined.
Working to revive the record store’s fortunes, Ms. Soskin pressured Berkeley City Hall to clean up the drug problem that had overtaken Sacramento Street, where Reid’s Records had been located.
That led to her working in City Hall herself, as a legislative aide to a council member, Don Jelinek. She also worked with Berkeley’s mayor at the time, Gus Newport, to help build low-income housing. (The record store closed in 2019.)
In 2003, she learned to use a computer and began a blog, which became a basis for her memoir, “Sign My Name to Freedom” (2018), edited by her cousin J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, a journalist and author.
She recalled a searing episode in the 1950s when she entered a suburban diner in the Walnut Hill area with three of her children around 5 p.m.
“After a very long time, the waitress came over,” she wrote. “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.”
Ms. Soskin returned with her children to her car. “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?”
Information on Ms. Soskin’s survivors was not immediately available.
As she approached her 100th birthday, Ms. Soskin continued to work, returning to the job after a stroke in 2019, although on a reduced schedule via video conference, and after sustaining injuries in 2016 from a burglar who attacked her after breaking into her apartment in the middle of the night.
Even off duty, Ms. Soskin was devoted to wearing her ranger uniform.
“When I’m on the streets or on an escalator or elevator, I am making every little girl of color aware of a career choice she may not have known she had,” Ms. Soskin said in a 2015 interview with the Department of the Interior. “The pride is evident in their eyes.”
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