Betty Reid Soskin, a pioneering historian and the oldest active U.S. park ranger until her retirement in 2022, died Sunday at her home in Richmond. She was 104.
Soskin served more than 15 years as a ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, where she led tours and helped shape the park’s narrative by centering the experiences of Black women during World War II.
“Being a primary source in the sharing of that history — my history — and helping give shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said in a National Park Service statement after her retirement. “It brought meaning to my final years.”
Family members confirmed her death in a Facebook post, saying Soskin was surrounded by loved ones. Her son, Robert Reid, said she died in hospice care after being hospitalized for an intestinal blockage and choosing not to undergo surgery.
“Her cause of death was living,” Reid said, recalling his mother joking at the hospital. “She lived it up and there was nothing left in the end. She was ready to go … she was her to the very end.”
While many people came to know Soskin through her work with the National Park Service, Reid emphasized the breadth of her life before she became a ranger at age 85. She was a business owner, a singer-songwriter and an anti-war and civil rights activist, and was a close friend of Malvina Reynolds, the Berkeley songwriter best known for “Little Boxes.”
Soskin was born Betty Charbonnet on Sept. 22, 1921, in Detroit to a Louisiana Creole family. She lived in New Orleans before moving to Oakland at age 6, years before the large migration of African Americans to the Bay Area during World War II.
During the war, Soskin worked as a file clerk for a segregated shipyard workers union auxiliary. She was later hired by the U.S. Air Force in 1942 but quit after learning she had been employed because supervisors mistakenly believed she was white, according to a National Park Service biography.
After the war, Soskin and her first husband, Mel Reid, bought property and built their home in an all-white suburb of Walnut Creek, becoming the first Black family in the area in the 1950s. They faced death threats and hostility from neighbors.
In 1945, the couple founded Reid’s Records, a longtime Berkeley institution dedicated to the distribution of African American music. In the 1980s and 1990s, Soskin took over the business and expanded its offerings to include church supplies as the music industry evolved.
Soskin was also deeply involved in the civil rights movement. According to her son, she became active in the Mount Diablo Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, where an emphasis on progressive politics and social action made her feel welcomed.
In the 1960s, she wrote and performed original protest songs addressing racism, war and social justice. In the 1970s, she raised money from white donors in the Diablo Valley to support the Black Panther Party; some members of the extended Reid family were active in the organization.
Her musical legacy is enshrined in the 2024 musical “Sign My Name to Freedom,” which shares its title with her 2018 memoir. Robert Reid said the name comes from a song his mother wrote honoring women who traveled to Mississippi to help Black residents register to vote.
“Even though my mother’s gone, she’ll still be around,” he said, referring to the documentary film “Sign My Name to Freedom,” which he hopes will be released soon.
Later in life, Soskin worked as a field representative for former state Assembly members Dion Aroner and Loni Hancock and was active in planning Richmond’s Rosie the Riveter park. Her talks about race and social change frequently sold out.
She received numerous honors for her work. In 1995, she was named California Woman of the Year. In 2015, she received a presidential coin from President Barack Obama after helping light the National Christmas Tree at the White House.
In June 2016, Soskin was awakened in her Richmond home by a robber who dragged her from her bedroom and beat her. She was 94 at the time. Soskin recovered and returned to work just weeks later. The stolen presidential coin was later replaced.
“I don’t want to face the public as a victim. I’m a survivor,” she said at the time. “People need to know I’m all right, and you can send that message.”
Glamour magazine named Soskin a Woman of the Year in 2018, and she was later honored with an entry in the Congressional Record.
Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez called Soskin “an amazing woman” with “moxie” who brought history to life through storytelling.
“She is the embodiment of resilience,” Martinez said. “She is the embodiment of self-awareness and understanding the meaning of social justice. She’s gonna be missed. … She also was a good example of compassion and forgiveness, and I think that’s what gave her strength.”
In 2019, Soskin suffered a stroke but recovered and returned to work at the Rosie the Riveter museum five months later. When she returned in January 2020, she told staff and well-wishers that she feared she might not recover.
“But it’s amazing,” she said after arriving back at the park.
Contra Costa County Supervisor John Gioia recalled meeting Soskin before she was hired at the Rosie the Riveter museum, when he asked how she felt about the park given its history of discrimination.
Soskin told him that those stories — both the uplifting and the painful — needed to be told, but she was unsure whether they actually would be. Gioia said the conversation stayed with him because Soskin, who questioned whether the park would fully confront that history, ultimately became one of the people entrusted to tell it.
“She had this hesitation, but she went on to be part of history to tell these stories,” Gioia said.
Soskin divorced Mel Reid in 1972 and married Dr. William Soskin in 1978. She met her second husband while working as an administrator at the University of California. Both of her husbands and her father died in the late 1980s.
Soskin is survived by her son, Robert Thomas Reid of Oakland; her daughters, Diara Melitte Kitty Reid and Dorian Leon Reid of Richmond; five grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and three nieces.
Her life is also the subject of the documentary “No Time to Waste: The Urgent Mission of Betty Reid Soskin,” which celebrates her work to restore what the film describes as “critical missing chapters of America’s story.”
The family encouraged those wishing to honor Soskin’s legacy to donate to Betty Reid Soskin Middle School or support completion of the documentary, “Sign My Name to Freedom.”
