FILE -- Ranger Betty Reid Soskin sits in front of the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Center.

Betty Reid Soskin, a longtime Bay Area activist and songwriter, founder of one of California’s oldest record shops, and once the oldest park ranger in the country, died peacefully at her Richmond home on Sunday morning, her family announced on social media. She was 104 years old.

Born in Detroit to a Cajun-Creole family that later moved to Louisiana, Reid Soskin was just six years old when the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 destroyed her family’s home and she and her parents left New Orleans, following her paternal grandfather to Oakland. She graduated from Castlemont High School while the World’s Fair was underway on Treasure Island, and the Golden Gate Bridge had just been constructed.  

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“I grew up at a time when college was only for the privileged,” she recounted in her blog in 2017. “Young women whose parents could afford to, sent them to higher education in order to enable them to marry well.” 

In the 1940s, when many of the Bay Area’s factories and shipyards were repurposed to aid in World War II efforts, Reid Soskin began working as a file clerk in the all-Black auxiliary of the segregated union Boilermaker’s A-36, primarily filing change-of-address cards for employees. It was a time when half a million Black Americans moved to California to work in the booming defense industries, paving the way for the largest westward migration of Black Americans in U.S. history.

Betty Reid Soskin with visitors outside of the Rosie the Riveter Visitor Education Center in Richmond.

After an upbringing shaped by........

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