Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four, ninety-four, standing there receiving an award named after Carey McWilliams, and the only thing more beautiful than the image is knowing she didn’t wait for permission to make history happen. She made it happen, hustled it into existence, because that’s what you do when the official story is a lie by omission.
She grew up in Oakland when Oakland meant something different, lived through Richmond when the shipyards were screaming with wartime production, watched Rosie the Riveter get turned into a whitewashed myth, and said no. Not on her watch. This woman looked at the National Park Service, the National Park Service, that monument to official narratives and carefully curated memory, and pushed them to tell the truth about Black women who built ships and raised families and made America work while America pretended they were invisible.
The California Studies Association giving her the McWilliams Award is perfect because McWilliams understood California was never the golden dream they sold you, it was blood and labor and stolen land and brilliant resistance all tangled together. Betty Reid Soskin gets that. She lived that. And instead of writing bitter memoirs or fading into comfortable retirement, she put on a park ranger uniform and became America’s oldest working ranger, standing in that Richmond park every day telling uncomfortable truths to tourists who came expecting simple nostalgia.
That’s the thing about authenticity, it doesn’t retire. It doesn’t smooth over the rough edges for the sake of consensus. Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four is still fighting to make the record honest, still showing up, still refusing to let history be sanitized. That’s not activism as performance art. That’s life as resistance.
The full text of Betty’s acceptance speech can be seen at the linked site.