Betty Reid Soskin Biography

99-year-old Betty Charbonnet Reid Soskin is America's oldest active park ranger, among other things. Her storytelling abilities have made her a sought-after public speaker, including appearances on NPR's The Moth, The Today Show, and CNN's Anderson Cooper 360, among other important radio and television shows. She was selected one of Glamour Magazine's "Women of the Year" in 2018, and the National Women's History Project named her one of the country's "Ten Outstanding Women" in 2005. She was named a "Woman of the Year" by the California State Legislature in 1995, and she was chosen to introduce Barack Obama at the annual Christmas Tree Lighting event on PBS in 2015. Betty was born in Detroit in 1921 to a Cajun/Creole African-American family and spent her childhood in New Orleans during the era of lynchings and Jim Crow segregation. Author, composer and singer, social and political activist, businesswoman, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, historian, blogger, and public speaker, she has had an illustrious career. Betty was a driving force behind the creation of the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, California, where she currently delivers talks several times a week. Betty and her first husband, Mel, were instrumental in integrating the East Bay suburbs by relocating their family to a historically white area. Betty and Mel also established one of California's first Black-owned record stores. Betty served on the staff of a Berkeley City Councilmember and then as a field representative to two members of the California State Assembly after working with political authorities to restore the street on which the record shop was located. In the 1960s and 1970s, she was involved in the Bay Area's civil rights and Black Power movements, as well as the anti-Vietnam War movement. Soskin's views are assisted by the fact that her great grandmother, who was a slave until she was 19, lived until Betty was in her thirties. Soskin's riveting commentary is directly informed by over a century of her family's and her own personal experience, giving her a unique perspective on the long arc of civil rights from slavery to the Dred Scott Decision, the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, Reconstruction, and on to the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panthers, and Black Lives Matter. Sign My Name to Freedom, Betty's renowned 2018 memoir and audio book, detailed her extraordinary journey. A Lifetime of Being Betty is a vivid portrayal of a wonderful lady and a lifetime filled with love and suffering, based on her compelling live performances. The documentary film No Time to Waste, which chronicles her years of work at Rosie the Riveter, was released in 2020. CBreaux Speaks, her blog, has thousands of subscribers.

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