{"id":57065,"date":"2018-11-21T19:34:06","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T19:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=57065"},"modified":"2018-11-21T19:34:06","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T19:34:06","slug":"the-97-year-old-park-ranger-who-doesnt-have-time-for-foolishness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=57065","title":{"rendered":"The 97-Year-Old Park Ranger Who Doesn\u2019t Have Time for Foolishness"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 97-Year-Old Park Ranger Who Doesn\u2019t Have Time for Foolishness<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Glamour<\/a>
\n2011-11-02<\/p>\n

Farai Chideya<\/strong><\/a>
\nPhotographs by Shaniqwa Jarvis<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
\nPhoto: Shaniqwa Jarvis<\/a><\/small><\/small><\/small> <\/p>\n

\u201cHistory has been written by people who got it wrong. But the people who are always trying to get it right have prevailed,\u201d says Reid Soskin<\/a>, photographed at Rosie the Riveter Park. \u201cIf that were not true, I would still be a slave like my great-grandmother.\u201d<\/small><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

As the oldest career National Park Service<\/a> ranger, Betty Soskin<\/a> is unabashed about revealing all of America’s history\u2014and her optimism about our future.<\/em><\/p>\n

What gets remembered is determined by who is in the room doing the remembering,\u201d Betty Reid Soskin<\/a> likes to say. So she\u2019s made it her singular purpose to always be in the room.<\/p>\n

Today that room is the auditorium at the Rosie the Riveter\/WWII Home Front National Historical Park<\/a> in Richmond, California<\/a>, where\u2014at 97\u2014she\u2019s the oldest person now serving as a permanent National Park Service<\/a> ranger. She packs the theater three times a week with talks about the Rosies<\/a> and the typically white narrative about the women who served the war effort, but interweaves her experience as a young black woman in segregated America<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There are a few things you should know about my friend Betty. Barely five feet three inches tall, she is sylphlike<\/a> and strong. When she walks, she leans slightly forward, as if facing a headwind, and strides with speed and purpose. Betty never planned to be a ranger. She got the job at the young age of 85, after working as a field representative for her California<\/a> assemblywoman, Dion Aroner<\/a>. Aroner asked her to sit in on planning meetings for what would become the park, and Betty quickly saw that, if she didn\u2019t speak up, the park would portray a whitewashed version of history. \u201cThere was no conspiracy to leave my history out,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was simply no one in that room with any reason to know it.\u201d So she sparked additions to the formal narratives: the 120,000 people of Japanese descent placed in internment camps<\/a> by the government; the 320 sailors and workers, 202 of them black men, who died in the explosions at nearby Port Chicago<\/a>. \u201cSo many stories,\u201d Betty muses, \u201call but forgotten.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working at an all-black union hall during World War II<\/a> and then briefly in an all-white branch of the Air Force (they didn\u2019t realize she was black when they hired her), Betty saw stories like these firsthand, becoming, as she puts it, \u201ca primary source\u201d from the time. Tom Leatherman<\/a>, the park\u2019s superintendent, says Betty motivated organizers to bring more people to the table: \u201cBecause of Betty, we made sure we had African American scholars review our films and exhibits, but we also made sure we were looking out for other, often forgotten stories\u2014Japanese American, Latino American, American Indian, and LGBTQ<\/a> narratives\u2014that were equally important.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the oldest career National Park Service ranger, Betty Soskin is unabashed about revealing all of America’s history\u2014and her optimism about our future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,20,25],"tags":[24354,24355,455,5758,24681,8918,29105],"class_list":["post-57065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-betty-reid-soskin","tag-betty-soskin","tag-california","tag-farai-chideya","tag-glamour","tag-national-park-service","tag-shaniqwa-jarvis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57065"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57066,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57065\/revisions\/57066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}