San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
An extraordinary century of life
Betty Reid Soskin, oldest U.S. park ranger, embodies ‘all incarnations of Blackness’ in musical
Betty Reid Soskin’s life has had so many distinct chapters — flood survivor, political activist, mother, folk singer, racial integrator, entrepreneur and, eventually, park ranger — it’s hard to fathom that at the age of 102 she’s embracing one more endeavor.
And yet the longtime Richmond resident, who became an unlikely celebrity in the early 2000s as the oldest ranger in the National Park Service, is now the subject of a new musical, “Sign My Name to Freedom.”
For the first time since Soskin packed up her songwriting notebooks and recordings five decades ago, audiences will get to hear the powerful lyrics she penned about such timely topics as the threat of police brutality and need for nonviolent social protest in “Sign My Name to Freedom,” a San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company production, directed by Elizabeth Carter, at Z Space in the Mission District starting Friday, March 29. The world premiere musical, written by San Francisco actor and playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, weaves her lyrics into dialogue between actors portraying Soskin at various ages over the past century: Little Betty (played by Tierra Allen), Married Betty (Aidaa Peerzada), Revolutionary Betty (Lucca Troutman) and Ranger
Betty (Cathleen Riddley).
“Betty has lived so many different lives, and it’s wonderful to imagine her speaking to her past selves, wrestling with herself at the same time that she’s wrestling with history,” Carter told the Chronicle by phone from her home in Oakland. “What’s always guided her is that when she needed to speak up or say something, she did.”
Sullivan’s script is based largely on Soskin’s personal blog posts and 2018 memoir, also titled “Sign My Name to Freedom.” It chronicles significant moments in her extraordinary life, from her Creole childhood to her West Coast civil rights activism and late-in-life career as an interpretive ranger at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond.
Soskin, who moved to the East Bay from New Orleans 96 years ago, finally retired in 2022 at the age of 100, after 14 years as a master storyteller sharing with overflowing audiences her experiences as a young Black woman working in World War II Richmond. She described to thousands
“It’s more like Russian dolls. Young
Betty and Revolutionary Betty are still inside Betty
even today.”
of visitors her feeling of a “love-hate relationship” with the classic Rosie the Riveter narrative, which she called “a white woman’s story.” Instead, Soskin drew attention to the lesser-known tragedies of the war effort: Richmond’s Japanese American flower farmers who were sent to incarceration camps and the massive 1944 munitions explosion at Port Chicago, 25 miles from the Richmond shipyards, where 320 men — mostly Black sailors — were killed.
Sullivan, who’s currently performing in Dominique Morisseau’s “Pipeline” at African-American Shakespeare Company, and the cast see Soskin’s personal journey as spanning the trajectory of African American history and social change from the early 20th century to today.
“Audiences can learn so much from this show,” Riddley said, “about the incredible Betty herself and about the journey of all incarnations of Blackness over 100 years.”
Born in the Jim Crow South, with a great-grandmother who was born into slavery, Soskin lived through and experienced segregation and recalls her father’s fear of lynchings. She remembers needing a white friend to act as her proxy when purchasing a home in Walnut Creek in the 1950s. As the first Black family in the Diablo Valley neighborhood, she “lived with five years of death threats,” she said, and her son Bob “thought it was normal to have rocks thrown at your
window every night.”
But Soskin has lived long enough to see the first Black president get elected. She received a presidential coin from President Barack Obama during the White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony in 2015. She’s also marched with musician and activist Paul Robeson, been photographed by Annie Leibovitz, been honored as one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year and narrated a North Face ad.
“Most people still only know her as ‘Ranger Betty,’ ” said Sullivan. “They don’t know that she ran one of the West Coast’s first Black-owned record stores, Reid Records in Berkeley, or that she sang at anti-war rallies (with Country Joe McDonald and Malvina Reynolds) and wrote beautiful songs with personal lyrics that are as emotional as they are political.”
In fact, most people don’t know about Soskin’s musical past at all.
She turned to songwriting and singing in the 1950s as a lonely wife raising four children in the suburbs.
“Music saved me,” Soskin told the Chronicle in a recent video interview from her Richmond apartment, with her daughter, Di’ara Reid, by her side.
Soskin explained that she wrote music for about 10 years, singing on college campuses and at anti-war rallies, but kept it primarily a personal creative outlet.
“I never wanted to be a singer, but I needed to be Betty who sings,” she said.
On this recent March afternoon, Soskin looked frail but still effervescent, wearing a bright red sweatshirt and smiling gamely into the camera. She speaks haltingly, her voice shaky from a stroke in 2019, but her memory is still razor sharp. She recalled specific people and events from her earliest years,
including a teacher who refused to let her perform a role in an elementary school play because she was Black.
“So I quit and walked right out of class,” she said.
“She’s been an activist even before she realized she was an activist,” Di’ara Reid chimed in.
Soskin said the attention she’s getting now for her music “is something of a surprise because I put that all away 50 years ago. And I really put it away,” hiding notebooks and reel-to-reel tapes in a closet.
“No one really knew that I