An Interview with 93-Year-Old National Park Service Ranger Betty Reid Soskin

[Starry Messenger]

Speaking of history, the New Deal and civil rights--I had the opportunity to see Betty Reid Soskin speak in January here at a labor/MLK event. She is luminous and a living witness. Very powerful to be in her presence. She spoke of her unique role in exploding some of the myths of the Rosies, and making sure people know that this story included segregation, even in CA.

http://www.doi.gov/employees/news/womens-history-month-an-interview-with-93-year-old-national-park-service-ranger-betty-reid-soskin.cfm

With Women’s History Month upon us, we at the Department of the Interior interviewed Betty Reid Soskin, who at 93 is the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service. Great-granddaughter of a slave and a file clerk in a Jim Crow union hall during World War II, Reid-Soskin began her career with NPS at the age of 85 at Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park and was a driving force behind the park years prior. Between speaking engagements, conducting her bus tours, and giving presentations at the park’s visitors’ center, she found time to share her thoughts about her connections to the park, her past and the future.

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What is your World War II story?

In 1942 I was a 20-year-old file clerk in a Jim Crow segregated union auxiliary — Boilermakers Auxiliary 36. Labor unions were not yet racially integrated and wouldn’t be for another decade, so the unions created all-black unions for workers. When I graduated from high school as a young woman of color, my chances for employment were limited to two — working in agriculture or as a domestic servant. My parents were part of the service workers’ generation. My elder sister worked the first five years of her marriage as half of a domestic team; her husband was a chauffeur, and she was a housekeeper for a white family. Because they lived in, they could save every penny toward the purchase of their first home. This was the pathway into the middle class for black folks. I share that story to show that my job as a clerk in a Jim Crow union hall was a step up; the equivalent of today’s young woman of color being the first in her family to enter college.

Can you tell us how your personal history and a seat at the table led to your role in helping NPS shape what was then a new urban park to your role as a ranger?

I was introduced to the park system in 2000, while working in Richmond, Calif., as a field representative for a member of the State Assembly. That year, planners from NPS gathered in Richmond to figure out just how to shape an experimental urban park that would pay tribute to the home-front workers of World War II and consist of nonfederal sites scattered throughout the city. California owned the land for one of the sites — the historic Ford Assembly Plant — had a seat at the table. That seat was filled by one small field representative of color, me. It was while watching a presentation about the sites that I realized I was the only one who, from memory, recognized that the dozen or more sites that would form the park were sites of racial segregation. I also discovered that the planners from NPS were interested in the untold stories and lost conversations of the history that I represented. For the first time since I was that naive young 20-year-old in that segregated union hall, I was in a position to learn, and share, the rest of the story. In 2003, I left my state job to become a consultant to the park; and in 2007, I became a ranger.

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What do you think she and your mother would think of the changes you have seen in history?

We have witnessed so much of American history — slavery, reconstruction, World War I, Great Depression, World War II, Martin Luther King Jr., assassinations of the Kennedys, Vietnam, the Moon Landing, the Mars Probe, Sept. 11, Iraq, Iran — I can’t breathe. Add it to the fact that on Jan. 20, 2009, I witnessed — as a seated guest of my state representative, George Miller, with a snapshot of my great-grandmother in my breast pocket — the inauguration of our first African American president in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, a memorial for a president whose life was contemporary with my great-grandmother’s. I find it incredible that all of this, and more, happened within the lives of three women who interacted as adults. That’s how fast time goes.

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Can you tell us of a time when others tried to make you feel unequal?

I think there is nothing more chilling than to answer my doorbell in my own lovely suburban redwood split-level home in a California valley only to have the caller (usually a male agent) look past me into the room and ask if he can see the “lady of the house.”

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[niyad]

1. k and r and thank you.