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Betty Reid Soskin, famously the oldest park ranger in the United States when she retired in 2022 at the age of 100, died in Richmond, Calif. on Dec. 21. She was 104 years old.
“This morning on the Winter Solstice, our mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, Betty Reid Soskin, passed away peacefully … she led a fully packed life and was ready to leave,” a family representative said in a written statement.
For years, Soskin was a notable presence at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Park in Richmond, a historically industrial city near San Francisco integral to the war effort.
She came to the role late in life, beginning as a temporary NPS employee at the age of 84, eventually giving popular talks at the park, located across a series of restored factory buildings on the city’s waterfront, including the former Ford Assembly Plant.
Born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit, Mich. on Sept. 22, 1921, Soskin was the great-granddaughter of a slave.
She grew up in New Orleans, surviving the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, an event that prompted her family to relocate to the West Coast. She served as a file clerk in the U.S. Air Force for the Boilermaker’s Union during World War II, according to the National Park Service.
After the war, Soskin opened Reid’s Records in Berkeley, Calif. with then-husband Mel Reid, renowned as one of the first Black-owned music stores in the region.
Soon, she began to take an interest in advocacy, taking on roles ranging from fundraising for the Black Panthers to field representative for local politicians.
Soskin became integral to the early planning process for the Rosie the Riveter park site in Richmond, a sprawling, waterfront manufacturing zone that reached its production peak during WWII.
The park first opened in 2000, with a proper visitor’s center following just over a decade later. Soskin began giving talks at the park, telling about the war era and the story of the Rosies, through the lens of her own and the wider Black experience — at first worrying that visitors might not find her stories to be important.
Her presentations, which spotlighted the oft-overlooked role racial segregation played in the lives of workers during the war, became a highlight of site visits.
“What gets remembered is determined by who is in the room doing the remembering,” Soskin often said.
In September, the local legend and national treasure celebrated her 104th birthday surrounded by admiring children and loved ones at Betty Reid Soskin Middle School in El Sobrante, Calif, Richmondside reported.
A documentary film about Soskin, “Sign My Name To Freedom,” is slated for release next year. Her memoir, with the same title, was published in 2018.
