Betty Reid Soskin wrote civil rights songs, marched with the Black Panthers and ran a pioneering Berkeley record store in a remarkably colorful life that took her into her early ’80s.
She was just getting started.
The longtime Oakland, California, resident born on Sept. 22, 1921, began showing up in 2000 at National Park Service planning sessions for a new Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in 2000. In time, she was guiding visitors and telling a complicated wartime story she had lived through.
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“What gets remembered,” Soskin said in a videotaped introduction to the historical park located in the industrial East Bay city of Richmond, “is determined by who’s in the room doing the remembering.”
