Betty Reid Soskin, a fount of history who was the National Park Service's oldest ranger when she retired a few years ago, has died at the age of 104.
Soskin, whose family confirmed her death on Dec. 21 in a Facebook post, had spent more than a dozen years sharing her stories as a park ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, intent on filling missing chapters of the U.S. narrative that only someone like her could know. They did not share her cause of death.
Born in Detroit in 1921, Soskin was the great-granddaughter of a former Louisiana slave, according to “No Time to Waste: The Urgent Message of Betty Reid Soskin,” a documentary about her life produced in association with the Rosie the Riveter Trust.
Soskin's Cajun-Creole family moved to California six years later, where she grew up in Richmond and worked as a file clerk in a segregated shipyard union hall supporting U.S. efforts in World War II. Decades of discrimination would steel her character and resolve.
As a child of what she called the “service workers generation” – i.e. bellhops, laborers, Pullman porters and domestic servants – Soskin was well aware of racism and its effects. Her gig as a union clerk, she said, represented a step up, the equivalent of someone in more modern times being the first in their family to go to college.
