She Can Do It

She Can Do It

Ranger Betty Reid Soskin reflects on less rosy times.

When Betty Reid Soskin took a job at age 20 in a segregated boilermaker’s union hiring hall in Richmond in 1942, she didn’t see herself as a Rosie the Riveter type. To her the term applied to white women. As a black woman, she knew all too well that she would have no choice but to work. When the Rosie the Riveter WW II Home Front museum was being conceived in the ’80s, Soskin, then a field representative for then-Assemblyperson Dion Aroner, assisted in the planning. Today she is a ranger at the museum that commemorates the work of riveters and shipbuilders. At 94, Soskin is the oldest ranger in the National Park Service. I caught up with her recently after she spoke about her experiences in Richmond during that time. It’s a story that’s at odds with the “rosy” depiction of the times presented in a film shown at the museum that preceded her talk.

Paul Kilduff: It’s funny seeing the film and then you come on. Do you ever get any blowback for that?

Betty Soskin: I’ve never received any kind of blowback. I’m not confrontational. I’m talking about me.

PK: What’s really great is you make it clear that there’s a lot of different personal stories from this time. How could you boil it down to one?

BS: Absolutely. This park might well have wound up being a bumper sticker. We’re living in the day of 149 characters. What we have done, it could’ve been simply, “I can do it.” That only became the starting point. What we’ve done is layer back in all the complexity of those times. I think that that’s what a national park needs to do.

PK: Was Richmond the first truly integrated Bay Area city, or the first one that had to deal with those kinds of issues?

BS: No. I think the way Richmond responded to the status quo may be different. I think that [Henry] Kaiser, in bringing in his workforce, actually without intending to—it was unintended—he imported the entire system of Southern segregation into the Bay Area because he brought in 98,000 people from the five Southern states. The point is that they had no way to reproduce that because in California, it was not encoded in our system of laws. There was bigotry. There was segregation by gentleman’s agreement. There was nothing that was as in the South. There were not signs that said black and white drinking fountains. That didn’t exist here. People had already gotten to know each other and were working together. Over that 3 1/2 years, I think that there was a social climate built up in those shipyards by those people that persists to this day. Under that broken social system, they nonetheless were able to outproduce the enemy. That’s incredible.

PK: You and your husband raised your kids as one of the first black families in the Diablo Valley area. You experienced racism. Can you describe some incidences?

BS: We lived under threats for the first three years.

PK: Where was this exactly?

BS: An area that’s now called Saranap. It’s on the edge of where Rossmoor is now. There was simply a little train station in there. It was very, very rural. It was between Lafayette and Walnut Creek. We built a house there with an architect who was a Quaker. He didn’t have any objections to building the house for us. The property was purchased by a white person in our names, because we couldn’t have made the purchase at the time. The minute news got out that we were not white, we began to get threats. They promised to burn our lumber as fast as we stacked it to build the house. The first year that my third grader was in the local school, the fundraiser that year was a minstrel show. His teachers and his principal were all in blackface. That is who we were.

PK: This was about what year?

BS: This was in 1953-54. That same community in 1972 sent me to represent them as the McGovern delegate to the Miami Beach convention, which shows you how fast social change was occurring.

PK: You don’t seem bitter—is that one of the keys to longevity?

BS: I am tempted to get a local entrepreneur to put together a little bottle of blue water so I can sell it. Tell people I take a teaspoon of this three times a day.

PK: You do hear a lot of people nowadays, usually white people, say that we’re living in post-racial America now.

BS: We are not living in post-racial. I don’t even want to live in a post-racial America.

PK: What does that mean?

BS: I want to be respected for who I am. I have no desire to have my race not regarded. I think that we have to learn to respect our differences.

PK: Are you going to get into a driverless car someday then?

BS: It’s almost coming too late for me. I needed it yesterday. I’m beginning to think about the need to give up my driver’s license.

PK: You still drive?

BS: Not for long. I’m losing my nerve on the freeways.

PK: You got to meet President Obama and the First Lady. How did that go?

BS: I was so awed by being in the presence of these two. They are physically beautiful people. Nothing that I have ever seen, no picture, touches the beauty of Michelle Obama. She is just amazing. There’s a sense in the two of them of power. They are super-bright people. I was really awed in their presence. I would trust him no matter what. I had no idea. You just get a sense of the goodness of this man. I wish they had allowed him to govern. They couldn’t keep him from being elected. I think they might’ve tried. I don’t know what the nation would’ve been like if he had been free to govern. I think that it’s to our detriment that we weren’t allowed to live under his governance. I think that the nation is the poorer for it.

PK: He got universal health care through.

BS: Even that had to be worked out from what he would’ve wished. It had to be shaped into something that could pass. I just think that whatever he gave us was muted by race.

PK: Did he really slip you the presidential seal?

BS: He slipped it to me when I reached out my hand to shake his. In his palm he had the Presidential seal and it was transferred to my hand. I hadn’t expected it. I almost dropped on the spot. It was such a surprise.

PK: What is it exactly?

BS: It’s a coin that says President of the United States and it has the White House on the back. It’s in full color. It’s beautiful.

PK: Where is it?

BS: I keep it under my pillow.

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BETTY SOSKIN Vital Stats

Age: 94

Birthplace: Detroit

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Motto: “What I am to be I am now becoming.”

Best Outtake: “My family wound up in Detroit, Mich., because my father called a white man [in New Orleans] by his first name, and they had to get him out of town.” Soskin’s family had relatives in Detroit so they moved there. Eventually, after she was born, the family returned to New Orleans and then moved to Oakland where she graduated from Castlemont High.

blogsite: www.CBreaux.blogspot.com

Faces of the East Bay