The nation is mourning the loss of a true American treasure. Betty Reid Soskin, the beloved historian, musician, and former park ranger who held the distinction of being the oldest active ranger in the U.S. National Park Service, has died. Her family announced that she passed away peacefully at her home in Richmond, California, on Sunday, December 21, 2025, at the age of 104.
For more than a decade, “Ranger Betty” captivated visitors at the **Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park** in Richmond, a post she took up full-time in 2007 at the remarkable age of 85. She retired just a few years ago in March 2022, a centenarian stepping away from a new career she had embraced in her ninth decade.
Soskin’s profound impact on the park, and on American history, stems from her insistence that the narrative of the World War II home front be complete. As she famously put it, “What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering.”
Her work ensured the park told not just the celebrated story of “Rosie the Riveter,” but also the overlooked and often painful reality of racial segregation. During the war, Betty Reid Soskin herself was a file clerk in a segregated auxiliary union hall for Black shipyard workers in Richmond. When initial park plans focused solely on the triumph of wartime production, she was the essential voice who spoke up to include the stories of Jim Crow, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the Port Chicago disaster, where 320 men, mostly African American sailors, died in a devastating explosion.
Born Betty Charbonnet in Detroit in 1921, Soskin’s life encompassed a grand sweep of 20th and 21st-century American history. Her family, of Cajun-Creole descent, moved from New Orleans to Oakland, California, after the Great Flood of 1927. She and her first husband, Mel Reid, co-founded Reid’s Records, one of the first Black-owned record shops in Berkeley, a local institution that operated for nearly 75 years before closing in 2019.
Beyond her work at the park, she was a Civil Rights activist and a songwriter, having penned dozens of original songs that chronicled her family’s experiences, including their life as one of the first Black families to move into a white suburb in Walnut Creek. Her memoir, *Sign My Name to Freedom*, published in 2018, takes its title from one of her songs.
Before becoming a ranger, Soskin’s tireless civic engagement had already earned her a seat at the planning table for the proposed historical park in the 1990s, where she began her mission to broaden the historical record. She was also a recipient of numerous honors throughout her long life, including an honorary doctorate from Cal State East Bay and the California State Legislature’s Woman of the Year award.
“She led a fully packed life and was ready to leave,” her family shared in a social media announcement, requesting that in lieu of flowers, supporters consider making donations to the Betty Reid Soskin Middle School in El Sobrante, which was renamed in her honor, or to support the completion of a documentary film about her life and music. The documentary, also titled *Sign My Name To Freedom*, is a testament to the fact that her voice, and the true stories she brought to light, will continue to inspire for generations to come.