IN 2022, when Betty Reid Soskin retired from being a national park ranger at the age of 100, she shared stories at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historic Park in Richmond and received a coin to commemorate her service.
The word “trailblazer was used a lot that day, but for Soskin, it fit.
On Sunday, the Rosie the Riveter Trust announced that Soskin had died at the age of 104.
Soskin was the country’s oldest active National Park Service ranger until her retirement.
As a park ranger and author of a memoir titled “Sign My Name to Freedom,” Soskin told her story at the 2022 event celebrating her as a maverick African American woman who co-owned her own business and became a park ranger at the age of 85.
“To be a part of helping to mark the place where that dramatic trajectory of my own life, combined with others of my generation, will influence the future by the footprints we’ve left behind has been incredible,” Soskin said at the ceremony.
Soskin participated in meetings with the National Park Service and the city of Richmond to prepare the general management plan for Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park.
She worked on a park service grant to tell yet untold stories of Black Americans who worked in the U.S. during the war. That led to a temporary job with the park service when she was 84 years old.
“Being a primary source in the sharing of that history — my history — and giving shape to a new national park has been exciting and fulfilling,” Soskin said. “It has proven to bring meaning to my final years.”
(Luther Bailey/National Park Service via Bay City News)
Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park was established in 2000.
Visitors to the park heard information about its history from Soskin but also gained insight into the times through her own personal memories.
On Sunday, the Rosie the Riveter Trust said Soskin was a foundational voice in the creation and mission of the park.
“As a World War II home front worker, she brought lived experience, historical rigor, and moral clarity to the Trust’s work, ensuring that the stories preserved and shared reflected the full complexity of the American home front,” said the trust in a statement.
Soskin was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1921 and she was raised in Oakland. During World War II, she worked in a segregated union hall and spent the years after the war advocating for the recognition of the war’s unsung heroes, such as women of color, working families, and those excluded from wartime opportunity, the trust said.
In the 1940s, she and her then husband opened a gospel record shop in Berkeley and later moved their family to Walnut Creek in the ‘50s, where she said they faced considerable racism. Reid’s Records kept going through 2019, passing ownership to her daughter in 1990.
“The Rosie the Riveter Trust is deeply grateful for Betty Reid Soskin’s leadership, partnership, and unwavering insistence that history be told honestly and completely,” said the trust. “Her legacy lives on in the park she helped build, in the values she championed, and in the countless people inspired by her voice.”