Sign My Name to Freedom

Sign My Name to Freedom by Betty Reid Soskin. Review by Ryan.

I saw Betty Reid Soskin in several news articles a few years back when she was being celebrated as America’s oldest park ranger. Betty works as an interpretive ranger at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Homefront National Historical Park in California. Well last January, my birthday rolls around and my wife mysteriously tells me that my present won’t be out quite on the day but that it’s coming soon. A few weeks later and I receive my autographed copy of Betty Reid Soskin’s brand new autobiography, Sign My Name to Freedom.

The book is a collection of memories spanning the breadth of Mrs Reid Soskin’s 97-year life full of experience and reflection. It was edited and adapted from her blog where she has been “having a conversation with myself” and reflecting on a life filled with experiences and learning since 2003. Although I knew of Betty Reid Soskin because of my own life and interests as a Park Ranger, her book of lived experiences is a fantastic recollection of her life as well as the evolution of the country with being a park ranger, merely the capstone.

Mrs Reid Soskin grew up in New Orleans and Bay area California. After marrying in her early 20s, she found herself working at the shipyards in Richmond, California home of the fabled “Rosie the Riveters” of which the future park is named. But as a young, black woman, Mrs Reid Soskins had a much different lived experience than the bandana wearing white women of legend. She worked in a segregated union hall, far from the famous shipyards and docks.

Following the war, she lived the Black American experience, traversing the turmoil of the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s…As she tells her stories from these times she recalls events that have led her to reflect on race, gender, discrimination, and more. She comes to profound conclusions told with such an admirable matter of fact style that I found to be particularly effective. Without spoiling the details, suffice it to say that throughout the latter half of the century, Mrs Reid Soskin participated in the social transformation and upheaval of our society living a life that is so full of interesting stories and revelations that she casually mentions dating Jackie Robinson in high school with a sentence and no further elaboration!

After a long life filled with civic engagement, participation in arts and academia, raising four children and just generally rising to meet the challenges of her day, the final 25% or so of the book is a reflection on lessons learned and projecting those lessons into the future. Mrs Reid Soskin discusses being on the committee to form the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Homefront National Historical Park. She was initially a representative of a local politician on the committee, and also recognized as a participant in the events the park was meant to celebrate. But as she worked with the planners, she saw a reminiscence of a history that she did not remember.

 “No one else in the room realized that the story of Rosie the Riveter is a white woman’s story. I and other women of color were not to be remembered by this park as it was proposed. Many of the sites named in the enabling legislation I remembered as places of racial segregation and, as such, they might now end up being enshrined by a generation that had forgotten that history. It was then it first occurred to me that what gets remembered is a function of who is in the room doing the remembering. There was no one in that room with any reason to remember the segregation and racism of those times.”

I know from my own lived experience that the National Park Service is currently on a big push to expand the voices representing who is being remembered and who has a voice in their telling of the American story. But I have never heard the agency articulate a policy or a vision as powerful or effective as Betty Reid Soskin’s recollection of her first introduction to the NPS. But to her everlasting credit, she made a point to become that person in the room. After reminiscing about the absurd bureaucratic process of getting hired (I can relate!), she became an interpretive ranger at the park and gives talks about the experience and contribution of Americans of color to the homefront war effort.

Now she is coming to grips with being somewhat of a celebrity. Her talks at Rosie the Riveter/WWII Homefront National Historical Park now book up months in advance (she compares it to Hamilton in a smaller venue) and she even had the occasion to represent the National Park Service at both President Obama’s first inauguration (with a photo of her enslaved grandmother in her uniform pocket) as well as introduce President Obama at an event in Washington. I found being a voyeur to her recollections to herself about herself an absolute delight that filled me with thought, made me laugh several times, and now has me reading her blog!

Photo obtained at: https://calhum.org/sign-my-name-to-freedom/

Link to her blog: http://cbreaux.blogspot.com/