She was born under Jim Crow and lived to help reshape how America remembers itself. Betty Reid Soskin’s life spanned from segregation and silenced histories to advising leaders, shaping a national park, and becoming a National Park Service ranger at 84—determined to center Black workers, women, and overlooked communities in the story of the WWII home front. Clear-eyed and unafraid, she spent her final years urging the nation to face hard truths. Her legacy isn’t sorrow but responsibility: history lives through those who insist on telling it honestly—and through her, countless people learned their stories mattered, too.
