Betty Reid Soskin

Betty Reid Soskin is a remarkably strong and creative individual who notably served her country in two profound ways. She served as a civil defense worker in clerical work for a large shipyard in Richmond, California during World War II, and she currently serves as the oldest National Park Service Ranger in U.S. History. Soskin’s work as a clerk in the Civil Service Commission made the factory work demanded by wartime mobilization possible, as she sorted through cards that indicated that a factory or shipyard worker might be disloyal to the United States. In order to work building weapons for the United States, an employee would need to swear an oath of loyalty. Soskin would read and sort information such as suspicious license plates of defense workers who had been within a few blocks of a known communist cell meeting.

Soskin was married during the war, and in her memoir Sign My Name to Freedom, she shared that she felt like a failure after three years of marriage without a child. She considered taking on defense work partially because she saw herself as unable to have children. Due to her intellect and skills, she was quickly given a job as a clerk. While the work was monotonous on the clerical side just as defense work was in the factory, Soskin remarked that “The camaraderie among the workers is what made the job important to me, and it's the only thing I really remember about it.”

Soskin has explained in her memoir, and to thousands of tour groups as a National Park Ranger, that her position in work other than manual labor representative of a generational shift, stating: “I was doing clerical work, which was seen as baby step up, almost the equivalent of today's young woman of color being the first in her family to enter college.” Fanny Christina Hill, an African American Rosie who went from domestic service to working for North American Aircraft in 1943, echoed these sentiments in an oral history interview in the 1980s, saying “The war made me live better, it really did. My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.” Soskin asserts that this contrast between what the United States aspired to and its actions extended to the men on the home front as well. In California, “German officers were being entertained in officers’ clubs, while black people in uniform were being told to come to the back door to be served, or were being refused service altogether... That’s who we were in 1942.” Soskin explains these sentiments as a National Park Ranger today, and visitors frequently comment on her strength and charisma. 

Soskin’s strength is evident in the circumstances she endured as an African American woman of the greatest generation. Soskin and her husband noticed a lack of United States Service Organization support for black military men in their area and hosted a dozen men for a barbeque one Sunday afternoon in 1944. Just twenty-four hours later, the men Reid had hosted and entertained were killed in the worst home front explosion of the war. The National World War II Museum described the explosion in greater detail in an article for the 76th anniversary, stating: 

For reasons that can never be accurately determined, a cataclysmic series of explosions—the largest man-made detonation in history to that point—erupted with the force of 5,000 tons of TNT. Instantly, 320 men, two-thirds of them African American, were killed and hundreds more were injured. The ships they were loading were nearly obliterated; a locomotive evaporated. The force of the blasts was felt 20 miles away in San Francisco.

The explosion was entirely preventable, as the men working at Port Chicago received very little training in how to work with explosives. The reports of the working conditions are particularly harrowing in hindsight, as the white officers directing black employees reportedly held competitions to see how quickly six-hundred-pound live munition rounds could be loaded onto ships. Such disregard for human life, with the backdrop of a world war in the name of preserving human liberties, was the reality of Soskin’s war time experience. 

Soskin did not simply observe wartime discrimination, but experienced it within her own career. At some point while working for the Civil Service commission, Soskin realized that had unintentionally passed as a white woman. Proud of her family’s heritage by way of New Orleans, passing was unintentional, and Soskin found herself as the only woman of color working in her position. Her actual race was later discovered and while she wasn’t fired, she was denied a promotion and recognition for her hard work. When a supervisor explained that people would allow her to continue to work in her current position, she replied “But are they willing to work under me? I’m in line for an upgrade.” She received the disappointing response that she would receive cost of living adjustments, and stopped working for the federal government. 

After Soskin left defense work, she and her husband followed their passion for music and opened a record store in the San Francisco Bay Area. She went on to have two children after the war. When she and her husband tried to move into an area with better schools, they experienced racism and death threats from their white neighbors. Soskin received an honorary medal from President Obama in 2016, but she was brutally attacked in her home and the medal was stolen in the same year. President Obama sent her a replacement medal, and while Soskin has endured a shameful amount of discrimination, she is largely considered a national treasure by the public today. Her programs at the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park always reach capacity. While many Rosies are seldom remembered, Reid’s name will surely be remembered for years to come, for a middle school in Richmond, California announced it will change its name to honor her in June of 2021. 

Betty Reid Soskin and Rosie the Riveter

Soskin’s story intertwined with the archetype of Rosie decades after the war ended. When the National Parks Service looked to open a Rosie the Riveter National Park in Richmond, California, a former major hub for WWII defense work, they recruited women who had worked during the war to provide feedback on the exhibits. After viewing the initial displays and visitor video, Soskin was beyond disappointed, stating: “The history as I had lived it was nowhere in sight. Not. One. Minute of it.” Soskin explained that the video told the story of World War II with “a Hollywood ending” as it depicted a narrative in which “we all put our differences aside and built the ships and won the war." This greatly contrasted Soskin’s wartime memories, as she explained that Asian and African American women were not offered employment in factories until late 1944 and early 1945. Similar to the cartoon of Rosie the Riveter, the images used in the video were accurate, but the context surrounding life on the American home front was neglected.

Soskin did not identify herself as a Rosie the Riveter until the park was completed and she was asked to work as a National Park Ranger telling her story. In an Oral History interview on June 17, 2021, she explained her thoughts surrounding the Rosie the Riveter archetype. Her commentary is most likely attributed to the Miller image that became popular in the 1980s, as she stated: “Had it not come out at all…no one would have known about us. It gave us a way in to tell the story – and the real story …is a story so much more interesting.” Perhaps a more appropriate view of the Rosie cartoon is not as a representation, but as a vehicle or steppingstone to remembering these women and their contributions. The contributions during and after the war of women like Betty Reid Soskin far exceeded the expectations set by Rosie the Riveter material culture.

Citations

[1] Soskin, 40-45; 154. 

[1] Ibid., 40.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid., 39.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid., 40-41.

[1] Ibid., 44.

[1] Soskin, 44.

[1] Gluck, 23-25.

[1] Mary Kay Magistad, “How the Rosie the Riveter Era Changed America: an African-American Woman's Story,” Episode, Whose Century Is It? PRX: The World, March 24, 2016, https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-03-24/how-rosie-riveter-era-changed-america-african-american-womans-story.

[1] “The Port Chicago 50 at 76: Time for Exoneration by Thurgood Marshall, Jr. and John a. Lawrence,” The National WWII Museum | New Orleans (The National World War II Museum, July 16, 2020), https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/port-chicago-exoneration-thurgood-marshall-jr-john-lawrence.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Soskin, 41.

[1] Ibid., 42.

[1] Soskin, 49.

[1] “Oldest National Park Ranger Shares 'What Gets Remembered',” Tell Me More, n.d., https://www.npr.org/2014/05/15/312707926/oldest-national-park-ranger-shares-what-gets-remembered.

[1] Kathy Chouteau, “El Sobrante Middle School Renamed in Honor of Betty Reid Soskin,” The Richmond Standard, June 24, 2021, https://richmondstandard.com/community/education/2021/06/24/el-sobrante-middle-school-renamed-in-honor-of-betty-reid-soskin/.

[1] “History & Culture,” National Parks Service, Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Park,  (U.S. Department of the Interior, May 2017). https://www.nps.gov/rori/learn/historyculture/index.htm.

Carl Biddleman, No Time to Waste: The Urgent Mission of Betty Reid Soskin, (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films), 2021. 

[1] Ibid.

[1] Ibid.

[1] Biddleman, No Time to Waste.

[1] Katherine Corrado, “Q&A with Betty Reid Soskin,” transcript of an oral history conducted 2021 by Katherine Corrado, More Than Rosies: Naming Home Front Heroines, Pace University, Arlington, VA via Zoom, 2021.

[1] Soskin, 102, picture insert “A Pioneering Life.”

[1] Soskin, 102, picture insert “A Pioneering Life.”

[1] Magistad.

[1]Abigail  Swartz, Betty Reid Soskin,  City of Hidden Figures, May 31, 2018, https://www.cityofhiddenfigures.com/past-projects.

[1] Farai Chideya, Betty Reid Soskin, Glamour Magazine, November 2, 2018, https://www.glamour.com/story/women-of-the-year-2018-betty-reid-soskin.