Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Betty Reid Soskin

Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project

This interview series was funded in part by a contract with the National Park Service, and with the support of individual donors.

Interviews conducted by Javier Arbona with Julie Stein and Sarah Selvidge in 2010

Copyright © 2012 by The Regents of the University of California Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Betty Reid Soskin, dated June 11, 2010. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Betty Reid Soskin, “Rosie the Riveter World War II American Home Front Oral History Project” conducted by Javier Arbona with Julie Stein and Sarah Selvidge in 2012, Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.

Betty Reid Soskin iv

Table of Contents—Betty Reid Soskin

Interview 1: June 25, 2010

Audiofile 1

Recalling childhood storm—Exploring her Catholicism—Adopting son Rick and the question of family size—General comments about aspects of personal life—Moving from Berkeley to Walnut Creek, CA after the war—Racial discrimination in the suburbs in the 1950s—Process of better understanding herself—Becoming a political activist—Confronting a group aimed at keeping blacks out of housing—Finding kinship at a Unitarian church—Development of spirituality with her children—Friendships and activism in connection with the Unitarian Church

Audiofile 2

Social life in high school—Memories of Mardi Gras as a child—Dating, marriage, and pregnancy in the thirties and forties—Being re-identified as African American as a result of the start of the war—Fear of bombing in the Bay Area—Working in Oakland during the war because not recognize d as African American—Considering racial identification issues—On writing an article for the California Historian—Recalling trainloads of southerners migrating to the Richmond shipyards—Recalling the Port Chicago explosion—Socializing during the war— Black music—Port Chicago explosion survivors—Political unawareness in earlier life

Audiofile 3

Political mentor Aron Gilmartin—Participation in Port Chicago protests—Day of remembrance and photo of E. F. Joseph—Segregated burial of dead from the explosion—Unheralded deaths and the need to complete the story—Port Chicago’s role in the Civil Rights Movement

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Interview 1: June 25, 2010 Begin Audiofile 1 06-25-2010.mp3

01-00:00:10 Stein: It’s June 25, 2010, and we are here in Richmond, California with Betty Reid Soskin. This is Julie Stein and Javier Arbona. And this is tape one. Thank you so much for sitting down with us again. We have some semi-general questions when we were reading through your first transcript and wanted both to get your take on what you think, of the historic record, needs to be fixed and then some other questions that we were curious about. So I know that you have done some more research into your early life, about the timing of your family’s move.

01-00:01:31 Soskin: Yes.

Stein: I’m curious about the revisions or what your research has done that you’d like to fix the record on.

01-00:01:38 Soskin: I noticed, first off, that I gave my age in coming to California as age four. And I had never had occasion to try to refine that before in my life. No one has taken an oral history. And that time was always kind of foggy for me. I didn’t know why that was. But since then, I’ve discovered very, very factually, that the age I came in was six. I remember, for instance, entering first grade in California. I remembered the actual storm, the hurricane in 1927. I remembered that that was a reason that we came to California. And at some point, I read that that 1927, which put the age up two years. And then when I remembered, really, the trauma. I’m, for instance, phobic about lightning and thunder. I’ve never understood why. I’ve never had any reason to understand. But I remember my grandmother telling me to jump into bed at the first sound of thunder because had I ever heard of anyone being struck by lightning in bed? And all the way into my adulthood, I would jump into bed the minute thunder rolled. So I began to connect that storm, that hurricane, with my entry into California. And gradually, after that first interview and that four-year- old—I began to realize why I would have buried that time, because it was so traumatic. It completely uprooted and changed my life. I was a child in New Orleans; then suddenly I was in my grandfather’s home in California. And it also seemed to have been connected to the fact that I was born into a strongly Catholic family. Completely rooted to the church. My grandfather lay in state for three days after his death, because the church we grew up in was Corpus Christi, which is the church he had built. He was an architect and engineer. That storm happened on Good Friday. So the symbolism, the religious symbolism, also would’ve been traumatic.

So I began to understand after that first oral history, why that period was cloudy for me. And I began to make connections. I completely was out of the Catholic faith by the time I was a teenager. I’ve never really tried to figure out 2

how that period figures into my becoming an atheist. But the fact that Good Friday figured into it seems to be symbolic. So there’ve been all these openings that have occurred since that time. And I think that’s probably why memory—memory is so layered that I think that we often begin to find out much, much, much later incidents, how they figure in the overall.

Stein: Did you have a sense of whether the hurricane happening on Good Friday affected the faith of other members of your family?

01-00:05:23 Soskin: No. There was never any indication that I—and I never discussed it. So the truth is that I’m not really sure what the answer to that is. My father remained a Catholic, and he was an official in the St. Vincent de Paul at St. Benedict’s Church. My dad died a Catholic. My mother died a Catholic, but a cafeteria Catholic. My mother was practicing birth control—she only had three children—so that she could not accept the sacraments.

Stein: Do you know what that meant at that time? Were diaphragms available?

01-00:06:05 Soskin: No.

Stein: So what did—?

01-00:06:07 Soskin: No. My mother had to choose between abstinence, I think, and her religion. And I think my mother chose her sexuality. And then it was interesting. When I was beginning to outgrow my faith, I didn’t discuss that with my parents because they would never have understood. Catholicism was a Charbonnet—it was in the DNA. So that that didn’t become an issue for me until I adopted my first child from Catholic Charities. And when that happened, I had to promise his birth mother that he would be raised a Catholic. And I then began to explore my Catholicism and why I had dropped away, because I needed to follow the dictates of that agreement with the Catholic Social Service.

I went back to church and got a conversation with a priest, asked for an appointment. Because I told him I had this child, adopted at nine days old; he was my first child; that I really wanted to honor his mother’s wishes; but that I had some questions, and could he answer them, maybe, and help me to understand so that I could do that; that my word was important to me. And he listened to me and he said, “Mrs. Reid, you are attempting to be intelligent about what is a faith. And it’s a gift of God and must not be questioned.” And I thought as I walked out, “He doesn’t know any more than I do.” [they laugh] And I never went back.

I went to my mother—that’s what it was—and I said that I really was trying to raise Rick the way his mother wished, and that I’d never discussed the fact that I just wasn’t going to church; but that I also noticed that she wasn’t going 3

to church, so what was it that—I don’t think that I thought she intellectually thought her way out of it. But I needed some support. And she said, “You know, Betty, some things are just not the priests’ business.” [they laugh]

Stein: Sounds like good advice. I’m actually really curious about—some of my own research has to do with adoption and motherhood and stuff around that. And I know that one of the aspects of adoption at the time was that they were very religiously based, or was often religious charities.

01-00:09:10 Soskin: Right. Right.

Stein: I’m curious. I don’t know if you would mind talking about—

01-00:09:16 Soskin: No.

Stein: —the process of both finding a Catholic adoption agency, or whether they were also racially grouped. Because I think today, we do adoption, I think, much more about skin color and much less about religion; whereas it seems like it wasn’t always that way.

01-00:09:37 Soskin: My motivation for adopting was so simplistic. My sisters—one was four years older, one was four years younger—we were spaced so that there wasn’t much companionship between us. We were never in the same growth periods at the same time. We were not in the same schools at the same time. My older sister married at nineteen. My younger sister married at sixteen, I think it was. But they were both pregnant at the same time, and I was not. And I had fulfilled the expectations of my parents, and my community, by becoming married. But I was really supposed to be pregnant by now. And so at a very, very early age, I was not going to be left behind; I was going to have a baby. What agency would’ve allowed me, at that age, to become a mother, [laughs] I don’t know. The Catholic Social Services must’ve been desperate.

Stein: How old were you? Was it 1945?

01-00:10:50 Soskin: Yeah. Rick was born in 1945. And I was married in 1942. So that I must’ve been twenty-three or twenty-two. But I should’ve been really questioned at that point. Now I wonder how anybody would’ve ever done that. Because I just didn’t want— I was just fulfilling my destiny as a Catholic woman. [laughs] Or even as a woman.

Stein: Were there overt ways that you felt that pressure? People talk about in that time period, the baby boom and everyone was having children. How did— 4

01-00:11:24 Soskin: I don’t remember the baby boom. And certainly, that would’ve been—no, it would’ve probably followed that. That was pretty early for the baby boom because 1945 is when the war ended.

Stein: Right.

01-00:11:39 Soskin: And the baby boom would’ve been nine or ten months later.

Stein: Right. [they laugh]

01-00:11:44 Soskin: So that at the point of pregnancy, that probably wouldn’t have been a factor. I think the factor really was that particularly as an African-American woman, there were no models in my family for any alternatives to being—a successful woman was married by the time she was twenty. If you were twenty-six and unmarried, you were considered a spinster. A successful woman began her family in her early twenties. I would have fulfilled the expectations of my community by being such. So that the pressures would’ve come from the community, not from the larger world, I don’t think. I think I felt it within my family. My sisters were both expecting children, and I was not.

Stein: Was it their first child, both of them?

01-00:12:52 Soskin: Yes. Yes.

Stein: Was there any stigma to adoption? Or were people just so thrilled that there was another child in the family?

01-00:13:02 Soskin: It was simply an alternative. I don’t remember it being blessed in any way by my family or—I would think that my parents probably felt I wasn’t going to bear children because I had started trying to have a child when I was married. First night. [they laugh] This is what we do. So that I think that by the end of three years, if I hadn’t produced a baby, my family would’ve assumed—as I did—that I was probably barren. And continued to try. It was another three or four years before I had my first child naturally.

Stein: It’s really fascinating to talk to someone of this generation, where having a large family probably wasn’t even really questioned. It was almost assumed. And then to see how you not only balanced family, but then went on to a career and to various careers.

01-00:14:01 Soskin: But that was not anticipated. I had my first significant job after the age of fifty. 5

Stein: Which doesn’t follow the traditional, let’s say, feminist narrative of—

01-00:14:16 Soskin: Not only that, there weren’t any models for me. I could not have envisioned what my life became after my children grew up, how many of the societal issues I would have lived out. My first child, for instance, was gay. My last child is developmentally disabled. I had to care for my aging parents until they died, at ninety-five and 101, respectively. So all the issues of gay rights, of developmentally disabled, of elder care—all of those things had to be lived out over these eighty-eight years. And had to be lived out personally. I had to know what those things were. I think it sparked a life of activism, and very early. But not as a working woman. I guess I worked in a dress shop in Walnut Creek at the time when I was anticipating, maybe, a divorce, and needed to begin to explore how I would take care of myself.

Stein: And at this point, you had four children, correct?

01-00:15:46 Soskin: Yeah. So career was never anything. In fact, I never even attended college. I never had a break between belonging to my father, whom I respected, and belonging to my husband, who was my best friend, who I married, who I met at the age of thirteen or fourteen. It was a predictable marriage. And I can’t say that I questioned any of that. It’d be great to say I was a feminist; I didn’t know what that was. [laughs]

Stein: Right. Nobody did. [laughs] You can’t blame yourself for that one.

01-00:16:28 Soskin: No. I really, really was living a prescribed kind of life. Until I moved into Walnut Creek and found that I had to either choose sides racially and politically or not survive emotionally.

Stein: Can you talk a little bit more about that transition to Walnut Creek and some of the—?

01-00:17:03 Soskin: I understand that a lot better since I’m a park ranger.

Stein: Wonderful. [they laugh] Fantastic.

01-00:17:08 Soskin: Because I’ve had to look at the whole context. Up until I began to work as a National Park Ranger, I could only look out of Betty’s eyes, this woman who grew up behind these eyes and how she had personal experiences. When I became a park ranger and began to look at that entire home front experience, for instance, I had to make room for the context. That had never been true for me before. When I moved into Walnut Creek—and even, I guess, in the first oral history—what I understood was my experience, objectively; the fact that Mel and I had grown up in California. He was a fourth generation Californian. 6

He had grown up in a family that had come out here during the Civil War. So had never grown up—well, certainly, racial bigotry existed; we were aware of it. It was simply not a problem in our lives. And I’ve learned since that had the civil rights response and revolution depended on the community that I grew up in—which was largely Creole, Catholic, out of New Orleans, somewhat privileged—had it depended on us, the civil rights revolution would’ve been another thirty years, probably. [they laugh]

Because life was tolerable for us. We knew that that bigotry existed, but we could find our ways around that. And it was mostly the people who came in from the South, both black and white, and who had to play that out in the context of the home front mobilization, that accelerated that social change. They had to come up with those 747 ships in three years and eight months, with the social system that was in place then. Henry Kaiser was not a social reformer. He was a savvy industrialist. And he delivered ships faster than the enemy could sink them; that was his charge. And he did it with all these thousands of sharecroppers he brought in, white and black, from the South.

When the war ended—and this is where it gets to the move to Walnut Creek— Mel and I had been forced, over those four years, to become a part of the migration population. In part, because we lived and were working in that framework. But our wishes for our lives were based upon House Beautiful and Sunset Magazine [they laugh] and Formica countertops and all this stuff, and a house. We had saved our money. We had gone into business for ourselves, for instance, because who wanted to work for white folks anymore? We had become, to some extent, radicalized; but not really. So that we wanted to build a house, and could afford to when the war ended. And his family, his parents had moved to Danville and had a little truck farm. They wanted to raise horses and have a garden. And there weren’t enough people in Danville then to resist anything. So that in visiting, we would pass through Walnut Creek on the way to have the kids ride on the horses at Grandpa’s house. And my husband picked out this lot in an unincorporated area of Walnut Creek, between Lafayette and Walnut Creek. And we wanted to build a house; we could afford it. We chose an architect to design it who was a Quaker, so had no problems with designing our house.

Stein: Was that a conscious decision, do you think, to hire—?

01-00:21:45 Soskin: I don’t know because I wasn’t a part of those discussions. I was pregnant with David. And my father, who was a contractor, or had done contracting with his father, was working with Mel. This was man’s work. They were going to provide for me and the children. And I had Rick and Bob and was pregnant with David, so there were two children at that time. And so I was not really involved in those—except that when this lumber began to be stacked and word began to get out that an African American family was moving into this area, we began to get threatening letters from the neighborhood. 7

Stein: And these were sent to your home in Berkeley?

01-00:22:35 Soskin: I don’t know. Either I don’t remember or I’ve blocked it out. I don’t know how Mel got those letters. I remember reading them. I remember one being from the county. And the county had apparently been told that Father Divine, who was the great black leader at that time, religious leader, had purchased the property to create a “heaven.” [laughs] And that they wanted us to understand that this property could not be used for anything other than a private home. We didn’t know where those rumors were coming from.

What I didn’t know, and what I began to learn as a ranger, was that the thing that came about with the end of the war was that returning servicemen were using their GI Bills to begin the suburbs, the suburbanization of the country. Because the GI Bill was administered locally rather than federally, the local banker could determine where they would float a mortgage. So that white people would be coming to the suburbs, but black people could not follow. And the white people were trying to escape me! [they laugh] And here we are, this young couple with two children, moving into the midst of the lion’s den. I could not have understood that context at that time. And I spent the next five, ten years in kind of awfulness of rejection, of having to sort out where I was in that whole thing, becoming the object of ridicule and hostility. As I was telling someone, the very first year, summer vacation—no, it was just before summer vacation, that my oldest child, who was I think maybe in third or fourth grade, entered the school, which was Parkmead. One of my neighbors, who was actually the wife of a psychiatrist who had moved from Berkeley because we were there—they were a Jewish couple. Marian Powelson came to me and said, “You need to know that Parkmead PTA and faculty are holding a minstrel show as a fundraiser.”

Stein: In the 1950s?

01-00:25:23 Soskin: In the 1950s. And I went to the school and the principal’s office. And there on his door was his end man costume. And that evening, they were going to be, all of them, in blackface, the teachers and faculty. And I walked in and said, “You know this is wrong.” And he said, “I didn’t know until I saw your face. But you need to know, Mrs. Reid, that we’re not really making fun of black people; we want to show you as happy-go-lucky.” And I said, “Do I look happy-go-lucky?” [they laugh] And he said, “No.” And I said, “Well, you do know that minstrel shows grew out of ridicule of African Americans.” Blacks; it wasn’t African Americans then. “And that this is wrong. And how do I explain this to my son?” And I said, “I know that it’s too late for me to do anything about this or for you to call off your show, but you’re going to perform it in front of me.” And I sat in the audience that night, in the front row, and made them put on the show in front of me. It was that kind of thing that began my activism. But I always felt that it was wrong and that people 8

were going to discover it was wrong because basically, people were good. [laughs] How I maintained that, I do not know. But do you know that the same community that fought my being there so hard sent me, in 1972, to Miami to represent them as a McGovern delegate to the Miami convention?

Stein: So it sounds like you were right. [laughs]

01-00:27:30 Soskin: I don’t know what you do with that. I don’t know what you do with that.

Stein: Right. You mentioned not having models for an idea of feminism at the time. Were there models in terms of activism, in terms of anti-racist activism? It sounds like you fell into it quite naturally.

01-00:27:50 Soskin: I fell into it as a matter of survival. And I almost didn’t survive. I sort of suffered a mental break when Dorrie was about two and a half, and was in therapy for about three years. Out of which I sort of redefined myself and learned to live with my insanity. [they laugh] It’s true. I figured out that all the things that were bizarre about me were the things that were wonderful. [they laugh]

Stein: That sounds like an excellent lesson.

01-00:28:25 Soskin: Yeah, I didn’t need to be sane. All the sane people I knew were crazy. [laughs]

Stein: Well, it sounds like in a lot of ways, you were put in a very crazy situation, with—

01-00:28:36 Soskin: I was! That’s why I say—I know now that I have never lacked intellect. I know that all the important things I ever learned, I probably knew when I was six. I think I out-thought my mother when I was about eight years old. So that I do have a sense now—I didn’t have the ego to support that until I began to enter later life, and I began to realize that the only difference between me and my first husband was that I had a sense of how much there was to know and he didn’t. And so he thought he knew. [they laugh] And that that was true of most of the adults in my life, when I was a little kid; that I really was never sure of anything when I was a child. I was always open to question. And as I aged into my, oh, maybe seventies, I began to realize that that was probably the root of much of my confusion; but that ultimately, I was right. That the world contains so much more than any individual could possibly know. And that it was a mark of intelligence. That I had a sense, always a sense of the beyond. And that religion stopped that process. As a kid, I didn’t think my way out of Catholicism; but somehow, the answer that God made the grass green— [they laugh] 9

Stein: Didn’t fly.

01-00:30:20 Soskin: —failed when I was about five.

Stein: Well, I want to ask you one other question, but then it sounds like this will be a good time to talk about the Unitarian Church a little bit.

01-00:30:30 Soskin: Oh, sure!

Stein: But before we get there—so many questions—did you and your husband consider not moving? Do you ever recall a moment when it got to be too much? When the threatening letters or the obvious racism of the school system—?

01-00:30:47 Soskin: No.

Stein: No.

01-00:30:51 Soskin: And see, I can’t speak for Mel. He died. After we divorced, so that I don’t know whether he entered that kind of period of summation that I did at maybe seventy and beyond. He didn’t live long enough to be that; he died in his sixties. So it’s hard for me not to apply the wisdom acquired in the last ten or fifteen years to an earlier period in life. I don’t know whether Mel discovered that. I do know that the pride of being a Charbonnet probably stood me in good stead, because I had this—someone once told me it was very hard to feel superior to somebody who refused to be inferior. [they laugh] And I think that was true. I never believed that I was inferior. Even through all of those times.

There was an attorney who lived just around the bend in Walnut Creek. His name was Robert Condon; Eleanor Condon was his wife. And that’s C-O-N- D-O-N. She was a well know ceramicist, and he was a well known liberal radical attorney. He was a partner of Robert Treuhaft, who was Jessica Mitford’s husband. And they were both involved with Democratic politics. And when he discovered I was there, they offered to give a dinner party to introduce us to the neighbors. Because they were absolutely enchanted with our presence. We were going to become their—no, that was going to be their champion for the year, because we were their cause. And I remember saying, “Absolutely not. You will not give a dinner party, which would suggest that you were giving me permission to move into a house which we have built and have a perfect right to.” And I missed his anger, because we never got to be friends with him.

But I got pushed against the wall, or we got pushed against the wall. But what came out was this feisty, proud Betty that apparently was the birth of this 10

woman who later became a political activist. At that time, I was fighting for my right to be there, and feeling perfectly deserving, and wanted to set an example for my children. It was really, really personal; it was not a part of any movement. I was not a member of the NAACP or anything. And that was, I think, the beginning of wanting to stand on my own. I remember saying, “I don’t want you,” the Condons, “to feel responsible if I don’t mow my lawn. You cannot give me permission, because you would then define my life as I live it.” And I remember those conversations, so they must have been pivotal. I can remember the words and the expressions. And I think that maybe those are the road signs that trace me back to a deliberate progression toward my political awareness now.

Stein: Did you maintain social relationships with your friends who were still living in Berkeley?

01-00:34:54 Soskin: No. We lost not only those connections—our home, because we had a swimming pool, which was not usual in our family, family members would come out for picnics. And occasionally, as my kids grew up, cousins would come out. We had belonged to social clubs, which we’d given up. But it felt natural to me because all of my friends and family were then creating their nuclear families and turned into those finding their way. So it didn’t seem to me unusual that we dropped away. But the other thing that was happening was that my marriage was falling apart, in that my husband, once the house was built—because he had physically joined the building of the house, the hammering; my husband and my father literally, with a couple of laborers, built the house.

Stein: Wow.

01-00:36:13 Soskin: But once that was done, he turned his attention back to the business. And I was left pretty much alone in the suburbs. Not unlike my counterparts who were white suburbanites. This was all pre-Betty Friedan. [they laugh] So we really were all kind of women together raising children. So it didn’t seem, even then, unusual for me. I was becoming a typical suburban housewife, with the addition of being an African American. And when I say it was extreme, Mel would leave at seven in the morning and come home after midnight sometimes. Most of the time.

Stein: Wow.

01-00:37:00 Soskin: And worked throughout the week. And built a very, very successful business at one point. Successful in a limited kind of way. And was becoming more and more involved in a world that I wasn’t a part of. And I was becoming a part of a suburban lifestyle that he wasn’t a part of. 11

Stein: When you say becoming a part of it, sometimes historians talk about women in the suburbs in the fifties as very isolated. And there are other people who talk about women joining social groups or throwing parties together or playgroups or—

01-00:37:40 Soskin: I think both those things are true. I think it’s both. I remember working with women on fashion shows at the country club. I also remember being socially active. As members of the Unitarian Church, political activism was a norm. Giving luncheon speeches. I remember being advertised at the local Presbyterian church, with a sandwich board out in front saying, “Betty Reid, colored housewife,” [they laugh] to a group of enlightened Presbyterians.

Stein: Oh, my!

01-00:38:24 Soskin: And I remember my speech with that sign. I said, “You know, it seems to me that I could be described as an artist,” because at that time, I was doing a lot of painting and a lot of writing and music, “or I could be described as a mother, or I could be described as a political activist. But that sign limits who I am.” And I said, “I find it offensive.” [laughs] And they were not stirred, but I think I gave voice to a lot of things then. Well, I had nothing to lose. I didn’t have a feeling of being a part of anything. Except the Unitarian Church, which really, really was a changing agent in my life.

Stein: How did you find the Unitarian Church?

01-00:39:42 Soskin: Because long after—maybe several years after—the initial shock of our being there, and when people who wanted to use me to authenticate their liberal views found me, I began to build this circle of liberals around me. There was Helen Scharmer, all these people from the greater valley. I learned of a couple, a black couple who bought a house in Gregory Gardens, which was a rather low-cost housing development out in Pleasant Hill, which was just developing. Median income was—the guy was a truck driver, I think, and his wife was either a nurse or a nurse’s aide. I didn’t really know them. But there were a series of stories that began to occur in the local press about these people coming into—and the problems that the community was having. The fact that the improvement association was meeting on thus-and-so night to decide on how they were going to get rid of these people. And blithely I figured that I had experienced this here; that I was probably the only person in the valley that knew that you could grow beyond that; and that my community had gone through the same kind of thing, and that we had come out the other side. And that maybe if I told that, went to that meeting and explained that you could get beyond this, that maybe they would. And so I don’t remember how it came to his attention—maybe through a mutual friend—but David Bortin—that’s B-O-R-T-I-N—who was an attorney in Walnut Creek, heard that I was planning to attend the meeting. 12

Stein: Was it the improvement association?

01-00:42:16 Soskin: This was the improvement association.

Stein: Okay, so you were going to go right up against—

01-00:42:20 Soskin: Yeah!

Stein: —your adversaries.

01-00:42:22 Soskin: They were just people. And I knew that you could get beyond that. And so why not?

Stein: Absolutely.

01-00:42:29 Soskin: And so David called me and said, “Do you realize that this is really emotionally dangerous?” He introduced himself and said, “I understand that you plan to go out and—people can really be cruel.” I said, yes, I knew. I had suffered through that, and I knew that people could get beyond that; and that that couple had bought their house and they deserved to live in it; and that I knew that that could happen. And I said I was going to go. And he said, “Well, okay, if you insist. I will be in the room. So just be—.” And I did. I dressed my very, very nicest, very conservatively, all beiges and browns [they laugh] from I. Magnin’s, and drove in my wood-paneled station wagon. All the stereotypes of suburban living, right?

Stein: Right.

01-00:43:30 Soskin: I drive out into the grammar school building in Pleasant Hill and jumped out of my car and walked into the room. And it was filled. And I sit on the end, about in the middle. And unfortunately, no one recognized me as being African American. I had told David that my color was going to protect me, because the people don’t say those things when there’s a person of color present, and that I knew that was going to protect me. And when I walked in the room, they didn’t recognize that I was a person of color. And the meeting went on as if I weren’t there. And I heard things I had never heard before. At the point where someone said, “If we fail to get them out under any other basis, we can use the Health Department, on the basis of the filthy diseases they bring in.” At which point, I got up and went to the front of the room and said, “I really am feeling like I’m eavesdropping. I need you to know that I’m one of the undesirables,” because they kept saying undesirables. They didn’t say niggers, they said undesirables. I said, “I’m one of the undesirable people that you’re referring to. And I want you to know that.” 13

And then I went into my little speech. Maybe took the floor to a stunned audience of about ten or fifteen minutes, and then panicked and ran out of the room into the dark, because it had become dark. When I walked into the building, it was daylight. Ran out of the building, hearing footsteps behind me as I ran out. And I didn’t know whether I was being chased—. Now, all the warnings of David Bortin began to surface, that I was in a dangerous situation. But by the time I reached my car, a man came up and tapped me on the shoulder, identified himself in the dark as a reporter, and wanted to know my name. Said that he had to get back in there to see what happened as a result of my talk, but that he wanted my number because he would call me as soon as the meeting was over, when he got back to his office. And then the next person who came up—and by now, I’m getting into my car, panicked—is David Bortin. And he said, “Betty, I’m here.” He said, “Go home and I’ll call you.”

I went into my house and I’m trembling. It was the scariest thing I think I have ever done. I didn’t know what had happened. But the reporter did call. And he said, “Those sounds you heard as you were coming out of foot—.” He said, “What they did was that they decided—.” Someone got up and said that he had gone to high school with me and that he didn’t know what had happened to me, but that the Communists use people like this to spread their message. And completely just tore me up. He said, “But the people who came out behind you left the meeting when you did.” He said, “I don’t think that the improvement association will ever meet again.” And they didn’t. But I didn’t know that most of those people—and this reinforced my sense that people are good—most of the people apparently were in there out of curiosity. They were not there because they wanted those people out. What I reinforced was their conviction that this was something that needed to be done. So ultimately, that reinforced my sense that we can get beyond this stuff. That there have always been people trying to get it right. The history’s been written by people who got it wrong. And I don’t think anything in my life has denied that, ever since. Time seems to be on the side of justice. The people really do. Except today. [they laugh]

Stein: One exception. So when you made this connection with David Borsten—

01-00:49:23 Soskin: Bortin. He was a Unitarian.

Stein: Okay, so then did he—?

01-00:48:26 Soskin: That’s when I became a Unitarian.

Stein: And was it that he followed up the next day, or after that he—? 14

01-00:48:31 Soskin: We remain friends. We remain friends. He introduced me to a whole group of people who were meeting then, about twenty-five or thirty families, in Nona Bickerton’s living room in Walnut Creek, who were an offshoot of the Berkeley Unitarian church [First Unitarian Church of Berkeley], led by Dr. Raymond Cope, C-O-P-E. [laughs] And I discovered that there was a religion, or at least a philosophy—I didn’t know what it was at that time; I couldn’t tell what it was—that was not based on answers; that all it was a collection of individuals who were convinced of one thing, and that’s that questions were where the action is. And that if I develop my questions, that those answers are ever changing. But that there were Christian Unitarians, that there were Buddhist Unitarians, that there were Jewish Unitarians, that there were atheist Unitarians; that that was not where the emphasis was. It was not in what we agreed upon. Those were not things. It was possible.

At that point, I had a child who tested in the 99th percentile in science and math. Rick—this was my gay son—Rick was so bright, the adopted child, that I had tried—and I’m still trying to make him a Catholic, right? [they laugh] Even though I couldn’t be a Catholic. Because I had promised his mother, right? Who was nonexistent. And when he was about seven or eight years old, he was building crystal sets. He was receiving radio signals. And I put him in catechism class to study for his first communion, because my parents were saying, “Doesn’t matter what you believe; you’ve got to raise these children in a belief system to save them, make them go to heaven,” which I didn’t believe in. And he was coming home saying, “Mom, if it takes thus and so many light years for a star’s light to reach from this star to the next one, how long does it take an angel?” I think, “This kid’s not going to make it.” [they laugh] This kid is not going to be a Catholic. So in order to satisfy my need for an intellectual community in which I could expand my religious beliefs, or at least my spirituality, and that I wouldn’t have to answer my children’s questions with God made the sky blue, that this was the place for me to be. And it still is. I finally outgrew that, but it did suffice for most of my lifetime. And it provided a community that I considered to call home.

Stein: Were your children ever involved in the Unitarian Church?

01-00:51:47 Soskin: My children were raised in the Unitarian Church. One is now a devout Catholic. [laughs]

Stein: Oh, wow.

01-00:51:54 Soskin: And I go with him to church occasionally. But that’s his right. And I think it’s largely because of the family history and his need to tie to that. Bob is probably an atheist, or at least an agnostic. Because the nature of our conversations—and thank God my husband was away because I got to control all the religious life of my children. His confusion—. [laughs] But Bob, his 15

coming in one day and saying—he was late for dinner. And I said, “Where were you?” And he said, “I was just sitting on the front porch with Randy and his mother.” And he said, “We were having a conversation.” And he said, “You know, she kept spouting the Bible to me, and she would do chapter and verse. And she asked me something that I couldn’t answer.” And I said, “What was that?” And he said, “She asked me if I was an atheist.” And he’s now about thirteen. And I said, not knowing what the answer was going to be, “Are you?” And he said, “Well,” he says, “I didn’t know, but,” he said, “on the way home, I realized I’m not.” And I said, “Okay, so what do you say you are?” And he says, “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what I am, but,” he said, “there’s no one up there not to believe in.” I thought, “This is profound.” [they laugh]

Stein: Coming from a teenager.

01-00:53:20 Soskin: This is a thirteen-year-old. And we still have the most spirited conversations about spirituality.

Stein: Fascinating.

01-00:53:31 Soskin: And then I felt successful. And I do still. That David can be a practicing Catholic and that Bob can be whatever he is, which I don’t know, is a sign of success. Because there’s room for all of us, because we’re not dependent upon answers. So, yeah.

Stein: You said—[comments with crew]—that there were some liberal members of the community who wanted to befriend you to sort of authenticate their expansiveness.

01-00:54:13 Soskin: I think that’s always true, yeah.

Stein: Did you feel that same sentiment within the Unitarian community?

01-00:54:20 Soskin: No. No. That proved out to be authentic, as an experience and as a connection. If there were those people initially, they evolved beyond that. An indication is that when the sixties occurred—and I’m living out there in the suburbs, not being quite black enough for the city and not quite white enough for the suburbs—[laughs] and this was my community, initially, it was upsetting because I didn’t know where I was. I was enjoying, by now, all of the advantages of being a suburban housewife, and all of the disadvantages; but having lots and lots to share with the people I was living among. When that, which could’ve been as disruptive, happened those people financed individually my experiencing the black revolution nationally. They sent me to conventions that were black caucuses. Not as a corporate decision, but people 16

would send me checks with notes saying, “This, you ought to understand.” And I was bringing back reports from—

Stein: And you weren’t—

01-00:55:57 Soskin: And I was on the national board of the Unitarian Black Caucus when the Unitarian intellectuals had pulled out of the body. And I had pulled out with them, with the consent of my church, who supported me in that. My minister and I were collecting money for the Panthers and delivering it to Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver in San Francisco. In the suburbs. We brought a black dance company in to perform at the local auditoriums’ civic center, so that that could be experienced in the white suburbs. They supported me in my growth toward blackness. And there’s nothing fake about that. They supported my involvement in the Black Caucus on a secret ballot, and there were only two votes against. And both those people who voted against my being supported sent me notes. And their fear was that I was going to be distanced from them. So even in that, there was a positive thing.

Stein: That’s amazing.

01-00:57:23 Soskin: That experience was amazing. I don’t know who can make that kind of claim. And I think all that went into where my life went.

Stein: Do you think that there is a larger role of the Unitarian Church in advancing race relations or discussions of the sixties that has been left out of history?

01-00:57:45 Soskin: I think that the effect of the sixties in the Unitarian Church was heading toward that kind of global change in attitudes racially. I think that it got sidetracked, because we went into the eighties, which was the “me” generation—the Werner Erhards and the human potential movement—and people turned in, even in the Unitarian Church.

And that broader thing shrunk. Its African American membership, I think, may be greater now than it’s ever been, but I don’t think it’s ever been the way it should be. Mostly because the African Americans are still— I think that fundamentalism is still the strength of the black church, and that there’s not that much of a pool of black intellectuals that will be attracted by Unitarianism. I think it’s the only way to go. [they laugh] But I outgrew it because I didn’t really need it anymore.

Stein: Right. It’s a really fascinating story.

Begin Audiofile 2 06-25-2010.mp3 17

Stein: Once again, we’re here with Betty Reid Soskin. This is Julie Stein, June 25, 2010, tape two. So we’ve been talking about the Unitarian Church, about your experience in Walnut Creek. I would love to jump backwards in time just a little bit, if you don’t mind, and talk a little bit more about high school and your earlier life. I don’t know if this is things that you remember quite as well, but it sounds like your memory’s really remarkable. But in your last oral history, there was some stuff that you mentioned about academics and teachers. I’m curious if you could talk a little bit more about the social side. You mentioned some really remarkable young men who you dated briefly. [they laugh]

02-00:00:42 Stein: What was social life like as a young high school student in—East Oakland? You were in high school there?

02-00:01:03 Soskin: Yeah. I attended Castlemont High School, when it was actually a castle. [they laugh] Really, it was a beautiful, beautiful castle. But didn’t survive, I guess, earthquake damage. Or it was retrofitted and all those bricks had to come down and the parapets. But at the time that I was in high school, there were very few African Americans in that high school, or even in East Oakland. We probably knew all the families that were in East Oakland, and were related to many of them. But my high school, I don’t remember very much on campus. It was mostly spent in my social life, outside of campus because where my schoolmates were dating the guy who pumped gas at the local gas station, I was attending activities at fraternities and sororities on the UC campus. The men in my life were two or three years older, as was the men that I married. So that I was probably more mature in my social development than the white kids that I was involved with.

Stein: Do you know why? Or what led to you hanging out with the college students?

02-00:02:34 Soskin: Because my social world was controlled by my parents. And that world was largely French Creole out of New Orleans who had migrated to California during the teens and the twenties. You have to understand that long before the Second World War, Pullman porters were discovering the West Coast. This was a place where, for instance, schools were not segregated. This is where one lived was not dictated by real estate developers or social mores; that this was, in the African-American community, at least in my part of the African- American community, really, the land of opportunity. And when you were leaving the hostile South in those years—for instance, my family came in 1927—they set up social systems here on the West Coast that weren’t dependent upon institutions that were general. The fact that Mary Castro, who would’ve been my friend, who was Portuguese, that I went through school with, her life centered around the Holy Ghost Hall. Portuguese. That vying for being the queen of Columbus Day was big in her life; Mardi Gras was big in my life. So that there were things like the YWCA that were segregated. We 18

knew that Lulu Chapman was our mentor; that there were kids in our community who went to the Jewish school on Saturdays; that there were these ethnically diverse institutions, which my high school kids went to. So that my going to the YWCA or going to black fraternity and sorority events was not a place of being separated out. These were affinity groups. So that I didn’t feel that my not participating in the prom was any particular incident. I went to— was it my junior prom? Which was very disillusioning.

Stein: In what ways?

02-00:05:20 Soskin: It was at—I don’t remember the hall. But it was the first time I had ever attended a social event where everybody was white but me. But before the evening was over, everybody was drunk. That had never been true in my world. In my world, people held debut parties when they turned eighteen. We were highly socialized. If anything, I thought we were snobs. So I didn’t feel separated out from my high school experience; but nor do I remember this being memorable. Because weekends were the times when I came alive. And because my parents were not involved. I didn’t even bring report cards home. In fact, I don’t remember ever discussing anything in high school with my mother and father, except maybe the language choices. My mother thought I should take Spanish because I look more Spanish than—and assuming then, of course, that I would pass when I got a job. I wanted to take French because that was the language of gossip in my family.

Stein: Right. [laughs]

02-00:06:48 Soskin: And maybe because they wanted to protect it, essentially. [they laugh] No one ever taught it to us.

Stein: When you would go out on dates with boys who you were seeing, would you bring them home? Were your parents involved in that aspect of your life?

02-00:07:04 Soskin: Oh, yes! Oh, my, yes. My social life was very, very controlled. We belonged to a young women’s club. There were weddings and christenings and debut parties. We had a very, very rich social life. And didn’t really—high school was a non-event. I don’t remember very much about it, except the rough places. The place I guess I mentioned, about trying out for Miriamne in Winterset, and being turned down because they couldn’t pair me with the white guy I was reading with. I remember that. I remember public speaking class. I remember not very much because it wasn’t important. I also don’t remember striving very hard. I don’t remember being tested. I think I wasted an awful lot of—I always got passing grades; I never failed anything. I always got A’s and B’s. But I never was tested. I never had to strive. I didn’t know that that was probably because I was very bright. 19

Stein: Right. Right. So it sounds like the really important times were not in school, but the social aspect of life, at that point.

02-00:08:41 Soskin: Yeah. And to the extent that I was successful eventually in the suburbs probably is based on the fact that I was very successful socially as a Creole. So that I was taking my rightful place, right? [they laugh]

Stein: Right. I’m curious, what was a sort of an off topic that you mentioned: Mardi Gras. What was Mardi Gras like as a New Orleans migrant community out in the East Bay?

02-00:09:11 Soskin: It was not picked up. It was not celebrated. I remember the religious aspect. I remember the novenas during Lent. From a very, very early age, I remember my entire family being involved in the Catholic rituals of Lent and Easter and Good Friday. I remember my mother’s set getting together the night before—I guess it was Shrove Tuesday, which would put it in Mardi Gras. And the women would get together to make head cheese, which was one of the meals, one of the—whatever it was. I don’t remember them making it any other time during the year. I remember my dad, who was an amateur musician, getting his little trio together and their banging the pots and pans and playing combs and tissue paper. I remember the internal home Mardi Gras kinds of things, events. I don’t remember there being any collective kinds of things when I was a kid growing up. And during the Great Migration of the home front, that would’ve been buried under by the kinds of African-American culture that came out of the South with the people who came here. Which means that I heard the Negro national anthem [Lift Every Voice and Sing] for the first time when I was twenty-one. And I thought it was very subversive. [they laugh] How can you have a Negro national anthem, when we already have one? Because those people had learned of it in high schools and colleges, in black institutions. So that that Mardi Gras thing, that Creole thing, was completely shot down, and has only, I think circuitously, come back with celebrations rooted in the Caribbean, in recent years.

Stein: That’s so interesting.

02-00:11:21 Soskin: But are not something that I feel necessarily a part of.

Stein: Then to jump back to what we were talking about before, historians are starting to look at things like dating, social life more seriously. So if this sounds like a silly question, forgive me. [they laugh] But were there rules that you remember in dating culture? Were there people who went steady? Were there people who were dating people, one date with every boy that they knew? Was there a division of good girls versus fast girls? Do you remember some of the rules around that? 20

02-00:12:05 Soskin: No, it’s very funny. I suppose two weeks from now, I’ll think back.

Stein: Well, you give me a call; I’ll be here. [laughs]

02-00:12:12 Soskin: But it was such an individual thing. There were unwritten rules that we all knew from our parents. Good girls didn’t stay out all night. There was no question of cohabitation. We wouldn’t—I don’t remember whether or not one kissed on the first date, but I don’t think we did. I think that that would’ve sent a signal that wasn’t necessarily—I don’t remember much effort being put into attracting boys. The girls in my group pretty much attracted boys. [they laugh]

Stein: Didn’t have to try to hard.

02-00:13:03 Soskin: We were kind of pretty. At that point, color and texture of hair were really, really important in my community. That’s since gotten much, much less important. I remember it becoming important again during the sixties, when I tried to get a natural and couldn’t. [they laugh] It wouldn’t stand up.

Stein: Did you recall anybody getting pregnant in high school, before there was—?

02-00:13:42 Soskin: Yeah. I certainly do remember that. But those girls disappeared. I don’t remember what even happened to them. But you just dropped out. I don’t remember anyone being pregnant in high school. You were hidden away by your family.

Stein: But you knew about it to a certain extent?

02-00:14:05 Soskin: Only as rumor. After the fact.

Stein: And they just went away?

02-00:14:09 Soskin: Yeah. No one ever really admitted that that was what happened. Or you came up with a little brother at some point, a little sister.

Stein: Right. Right.

02-00:14:19 Soskin: But that was really shame.

Stein: Were there, I guess on the flip side, people who got married quite early?

02-00:14:27 Soskin: No, I think that that must’ve been driven by the fact that there were so few options for my generation. That women’s choices were to be an agricultural or 21

domestic servant. Marriage, when you’re given those choices, is really, really premium. If you could marry a successful man, a student in college who was heading for a career, you were considered the most promising of women. That’s when you were successful. As I think I said, or I heard myself say in the oral history, that my mother once said of a very unattractive girl that they better educate that girl because she’s not going to get a husband. [they laugh] So that there was a premium on physical attractiveness. And those of us who were married at twenty were really considered successful women.

Stein: You said that one of your sisters was married at sixteen.

02-00:15:29 Soskin: She was married during the war, to a serviceman. So that would have jarred up all those customs.

Stein: So those rules were different.

02-00:15:37 Soskin: She would never have—she must’ve married about 1944. She married a serviceman.

Stein: Was he leaving—?

02-00:15:45 Soskin: Someone that she had known. But they married because naturally, that—and she went with him to a Texas base or something. So that broke through those customs.

Stein: I assume she couldn’t have gone if she was just a girlfriend.

02-00:16:06 Soskin: Oh, no, no. No, no, no, no.

Stein: That would’ve been—

02-00:16:08 Soskin: No, she wouldn’t. You’ve got to be married.

Stein: Yeah. Okay. I can pass it off to you for a minute. I have about a million more questions, but I want to make sure that—

Arbona: Yeah, okay.

Stein: Do you want to switch places?

Arbona: Sure.

Stein: Okay. Well, I know that he’s going to ask some questions about Port Chicago. But since we’ve gotten to World War II, in the first oral history, you certainly 22

speak about the war years. But I think because the project was so focused on Richmond, Richmond, there’s a sense to which I think there’s more to learn about how the war affected your life. Not being someone who was working in the shipyards, but I’m sure that there were—or I imagine that there were still some really profound shifts in your life because of that. Is that something that—?

02-00:17:07 Soskin: You’d have to be more specific.

Stein: Well, I suppose first of all, do you remember Pearl Harbor? Do you remember the—?

02-00:17:13 Soskin: Oh, yes. I remember great fear about that. I also remember being very, very confused. And I think that that colors my whole response to all these questions about the war. Because I wasn’t always sure who the enemy was. There was the Double-V campaign. There was the fact that I was being re-identified externally. There were all kinds of prohibitions now that hadn’t been before. I was being blocked in with people that I had little in common with, I felt.

Stein: Were these the black newcomers?

02-00:17:55 Soskin: Just newcomers, period. I remember being terrified of the air raid sirens, of living in a dim-out, living where everything had been turned down, where the sides of street lights that face the ocean were painted deep gray in order to not silhouette the Bay Area for submarines. I remember being very, very, very aware of all of those things, of being in a constant threat of bombing. And as I say, not having the security of that built-in patriotism that came with being a part of the war effort, I didn’t share with the people around me. I don’t remember feeling—well, wait, that doesn’t even doesn’t get at it. There was a schizophrenic kind of thing, where I had grown up as a proud American, devoid of color; and therefore, had this sense of shame about what America was doing. And to the extent that I was a part of that colorless system, I couldn’t understand what we—in which I am now incorporated—were doing to all these people like me, the schizophrenic African American. That schizophrenic stance, I think, is almost at the root of the mental break that I suffered many, many years later. Also that marks my movement to the suburbs and becoming in a white world, as opposed to becoming a political activist in the black world. All of that was set in motion by the war years, where I had this awful thing going of feeling, on the one hand, a part of and benefiting by a system that negated my worth as a person, as a black person. And it was very confusing.

Stein: You mentioned that your husband had enlisted and was given the option to be, what, a cook? 23

02-00:20:48 Soskin: Yeah. He’s in his third year, his senior year at the University of San Francisco. Is also a renowned athlete; he was a halfback with the San Francisco Dons. He went on to be a professional football player, quarterback, and of some note, had made All Coast, the Pacific coast; and volunteered, as his American self without color, to fight for his country. Because he had grown up in the West, without any of those old bans that we would live with. He volunteered and found himself at Great Lakes. And had been, he felt, tricked into the Messman’s Corps, because that was the only thing an African American male could do in the Second World War in the navy. So that he had chosen to fight for his country, and objected. And lasted three days, under intense questioning by a board of examiners. And because he was fair skinned with Caucasian features, though African American and always been proudly so, was sent home with mustering out pay, with an honorable discharge. And with the advice from the psychiatrist who had examined him that he didn’t know why he had entered the service as a black man; that he should’ve come in as a white man; but that the Navy could not afford to put him onboard a ship with men who might be easily led, because he was a natural leader of men. And he found himself on a train for home three days later. Now, that colored his withdrawal, and he went to work then as a trainee for the shipyards.

Stein: Was that a similar awakening experience for you? What experiences—?

02-00:23:09 Soskin: Well, I was having my own experience, because I went to work for the Air Force. While he was gone, or two weeks before he was gone, I was transferred from the Civil Service Commission in San Francisco to a job with the Air Force, which had taken over the Leamington Hotel on Franklin Street in Oakland. I was a transfer, and therefore had not filled out application papers and didn’t know that the Air Force didn’t hire African Americans, except in the canteen, to be service workers. And found myself in a position that I would not have had, had they not misread my race. And the lieutenant in charge of our section took it on himself to notify the woman whose desk abutted mine, to say that he thought that she ought to know that I was black. Or colored. And when she came back to her desk, very red-faced, I asked what he’d said. I had discovered, meanwhile, by meeting another African American, who was actually passing, in the restroom, that she was claiming to be German. And she asked me what I was passing for, and I very innocently said, “Nothing.” And she said, “You must be, because they don’t hire black people.” So this happened just a couple of days ahead, or maybe the day before. So I was sensitive to what that might have been, that I was being discovered.

So I walked up to the lieutenant and asked him why he had seen me fit; that I was not passing, and who had told him that I was colored? I understood from him, or at least from someone, that someone in the canteen who was also 24

African American had turned me in. Because I was working as a clerical worker and I was not supposed to be doing that. But he did say that I shouldn’t worry because he had talked with my supervisor and that my work was very good; and that the women in my section were, quote and unquote, “willing to work with me.” At which point, I said, “But will they be willing to work under me when I’m upgraded?” And I walked out on the Air Force, just before I heard that Mel was coming home.

Stein: That’s fascinating how parallel—

02-00:25:45 Soskin: So that this happened to both of us. Which is why we went into business. We would not work for anybody else. He was working at the shipyards in order to facilitate his growing business so that we could become independent, eventually. And we did. So that World War II experience was really a coming-of-age thing for us, racially. And we had to choose. We had to choose an identity.

Stein: And that was basically forced upon you because of—

02-00:26:22 Soskin: Oh, sure.

Stein: —the organization of the war industries.

02-00:26:26 Soskin: Yeah. I’m not sure what our lives would’ve been like. But then they all give you experience. I don’t know what that would be.

Stein: That’s so fascinating that they really are one and the same; the racism of the war, it sounds like, you were confronted with almost immediately.

02-00:26:43 Soskin: That’s right. But people who came out of the South to work as sharecroppers—and this is something that comes with my ranger self. When I read now treatises, doctoral papers, studies that are only now beginning to come out—people are only beginning now to study that era. But you read a sharecropper’s experience, who, in Mississippi, would have had to step off the sidewalk when a white person was approaching; could be lynched by making eye contact with a white woman in a town—. When you realize that those two people—that that white person who had right of way on the sidewalk and that black person who had to step into the gutter to let that person pass—was then brought here to the greater Bay Area in huge numbers to build those ships; the black person, with this huge expectation for a fuller life because those Pullman porters hadn’t been lying, things are better in the West; and that white person, who was expecting a continuation of white privilege, came together in this cauldron and changed social reformation—I mean, forever; and that Mel and I, who had grown up without the complication of having to 25

choose sides, who were first and foremost Americans, had to suffer the disappointment in that definition, as well as being lumped in with people whose experiences we had not shared, had to be a period of huge, huge dislocation for us.

Stein: Absolutely.

02-00:28:35 Soskin: I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t have had its effect upon who we became. Mel’s life, in his business, became more centered in the African-American community. My life became more centered in a changing suburban community. I was lucky enough to feel myself a part of that change. That because I didn’t compromise in my suburban existence, I brought my whole self with me into the suburbs and lived that out. And I think that that—we could not have stayed married. I think that we were destined to live separate lives because our lives took us in those directions. And I think it’s telling that we remained friends after our divorce; that we reclaimed that fourteen- to seventeen-year-old kids’ friendship, because we had parented four children. And that identity as parents withstood the divorce, even though I remarried— he never did. But even though I remarried, we remained friends.

Stein: Let’s take a transition here. Yeah, pause for a second. [audiofile stops, re- starts]

Arbona: So now this is Javier Arbona on the recording now. And we’re still on tape two, right? Actually, now that you’re mentioning that article, perhaps we can just warm up a little bit. If you can just summarize what you wrote in this article for The California Historian. And that could be a way to transition between what you were talking about, the Bay Area in the forties and the Port Chicago explosion.

02-00:30:31 Soskin: Yeah. The article came about at the invitation of the editor of The California Historian, which is the journal of the California Historical Societies of the State of California. These are not academic papers. These are largely oral histories from members of the historical society. When I was invited to write the article, I had never written such an article. I’m not an academic, and my career is based totally on memory. I don’t pretend to be a historian. But this was asking me to sort of codify that into a statement about that period. Because I’m not a professional writer, I kept getting lost. Every time I would try to rewrite a sentence, it would turn into something else. [laughs] Because I was not coming out of it as an academic, as a trained writer. I finally wound up with so much paper, with so many paragraphs, with so many pages, that I turned it over to our chief interpreter and said, “Somebody has to know what I’m saying, because people are going to read this as if it is formal history from a historian. And you at the park, you need to know what I’m saying, because my claims are not based in any kind of proven fact.” And nobody really had 26

the time for it. Naomi Torres, who was at that point chief of interpretation, said, “It’s too long, Betty, but I don’t know how to cut it down. You’ll have to edit.” And I said, “I don’t know how to edit, because everything that’s here is important.” So on a chance, I sent it in, submitted it to the paper and said, “You are free to edit this in whatever way you can, for continuity and for content; but I don’t know how to edit this. I’m being perfectly honest.”

It takes a global view of the greater Bay Area, which my belief is that this has to all become, at some point, a heritage district, that Richmond does not stand alone, that there were thirteen shipbuilding operations here, that there were innumerable sites that all—. Some of them have been destroyed, but all of them need to be remembered. And at some point, I think this story is going to have to be—that Rosie is simply one piece; that Port Chicago is one piece; that all of these Lettermen in the Presidio—all this stuff—Hunters Point, there’s Marinship—all of these things have to become a part of it. So I made the case for that in this article. About a month later, I get a letter from the editor saying, “We would like to use this as the cover article, and we’re not going to edit it. [laughs]

Arbona: Well, we’ve got to look that up.

02-00:34:20 Soskin: Obviously, it came out. It’s about five or six pages long. [laughs]

Arbona: Well, in reference to Port Chicago, I guess what I want to start with was to ask you about the party that you have referred to in so many places. You’ve talked about the party in your last oral history and in the news. Can you walk us through that day? Maybe how you were getting ready and whatnot.

02-00:34:50 Soskin: I’m not sure I can recapture that. It’s mostly in my memory in sort of broad strokes. I lived in a small duplex at 3107 Sacramento Street in Berkeley. The reason that’s important is that down Sacramento Street was the Santa Fe rail line, in the middle of our street. So that the home front was playing itself out right in front of my door. Day and night, there were huge, long trains of people being brought in from the five Southern states—or at least from everywhere, but mostly from the five Southern states—to work in the shipyards; hanging out of windows—because at that time, the windows weren’t sealed in trains—hanging out of windows, leaning out of the vestibules, waving. And we were sort of the welcome committee, all along our street. We would wave people into California. And down Ashby, which had Ashby Camp, which was a camp of all African-American soldiers who were MPs. I think they could only arrest black AWOLs. [laughs] But they were MPs, nonetheless. So they were a presence in the community. They were at the foot of Ashby Avenue, at Camp Ashby. So the presence of the war was there. I only discovered that there were black USOs, I guess since I’ve been working for the National Park Service, because I simply knew that the USO 27

was segregated, that it did not entertain African American service people. Because as I say, we were in the black community—well, it was not the black community until that time, but there were lots and lots of African Americans living—

We entertained the servicemen—either from Port Chicago, from Camp Stoneman, from Camp Ashby—in our homes. This was largely innocent lemonade parties, Saturday afternoons. These were not places where—we were sort of the homes away from home. And we were young, as I was saying, twenty—. This was maybe 1942. Because I was married, so it would’ve been after May 1942, which is when I was married. Through 1944. Would’ve have been that two year period, that would have been common. But it was common to all the families, the African American families, who felt this camaraderie with the African American people. And because we knew that they were not permitted in the [USOs].

So that that afternoon, there must’ve been maybe a dozen or so young people from Port Chicago who—and I don’t remember how we would’ve gathered them up. That’s a piece that’s missing. I don’t know that because of my upbringing, we would’ve been gathering people in off the streets. I don’t know whether it would have been at San Pablo Park, which we would—Mel was working at San Pablo Park during the day, as a playground director, which was in the community. And he was working a swing shift at night. So he might well have met these people in the park, because we wouldn’t have felt safe to bring people in off the streets. So my guess is that they would’ve been hanging around maybe baseball games or tennis matches, and he would have brought them home. So that would account for their being at the house.

02-00:38:59 We were dancing to records. It would have meant that my neighbor around the corner, Lela, whose husband worked with Mel in the shipyards, would’ve been one of those girls. They were probably unmarried young women, though maybe not, because Johnnie, Lela’s husband—but they were men that he worked with on the ships, that would—. And there were also athletes that would’ve been a part of his life. My guess is that these were probably young, unmarried people. I don’t remember any of them outside of the men. And this young sailor named Richert, R-I-C-H-E-R-T. And the reason I remember him was because he looked white. He would’ve been like Mel, only more Caucasian in appearance. And that people questioned his being there. For the first hour or so, they didn’t know what he was doing there because he was obviously an outsider. And he had to defend his status as a person of color. And I don’t know what the conversation was, except that we learned in that conversation that he was only sixteen. He had lied about his age to get into the service. And he was the one, probably because of his age, that I have continued to worry about all these years, as to what was his fate. And I remember because my name was French, Charbonnet, and his name was Richert, was R-I-C-H-E-R-T, that there must have been an affinity between 28

us. And his name does not appear on the memorial. So he has continued to be an enigma to me. I don’t remember any of the other names.

I remember when they left it was because there was some sort of curfew, either in their company or at their jobs; or that it was related to that they would be traveling in the dim outback to Port Chicago, because they left before dark. And that that explosion happened at ten-thirty and we were not yet asleep. And that we didn’t recognize it as an explosion, but thought it was finally that Japanese had made it, that somewhere there was a bombing; or that there was an earthquake, because we lived in earthquake country; and that that wouldn’t become clear until morning news, when the announcement came that Port Chicago—there’d been an explosion in which two ships were lost. And my immediate connection and my immediate sense—that scar has continued to live with me, because I never knew what happened to Richert.

Arbona: Would that come from the radio or the newspapers, how you found out about it the next day?

02-00:42:22 Soskin: It would probably have come from the radio. Either that or whenever there was a development of import, there would be the shouters, the news hawks, who would go down the street yelling, “Extra, extra, read all about it.” Those people were a part. And I remember them as being related to the sounds of my childhood; of the hawkers of fruits and vegetables or of cream cheese, which came in little cups; and that there would be, then, street vendors saying, “Watermelon, red to the rind;” and that this would have morphed into those “Extras” that were part of my childhood; and that those became a part of the World War II extra news of disasters; that there was a timeline in which all those things were related. So I would guess that that would—. And I don’t know whether that would’ve come during the night, either the Call-Bulletin or the Chronicle or the Examiner, which were the papers of the day, which is probably likely. They would have preceded even the radio.

Arbona: Can I go back for a moment to also thinking about this party? Because this young man that you mention is actually pretty typical of some of the—at least there were other Port Chicago men who also enlisted before the age of eighteen.

02-00:44:06 Soskin: Oh, yes.

Arbona: I think Joseph Simon and—so it’s interesting to think of a party where maybe these teenagers are dancing with maybe women that are, what, in their twenties. So it’s quite different from maybe what you think of a party today.

02-00:44:28 Soskin: I think that there’s implied in your question, or even the way it’s phrased, that these would have been, quote, “older women” with younger men, with 29

teenagers. I think that I would’ve framed this that these would’ve been hostessing young service people. But not with any kind of sensual, sexual implications. They would’ve seen themselves as the Hollywood stars saw themselves, as being USO hostesses. There’s an innocence about that. I don’t remember it being as anything other than that. There probably were some younger girls mixed in there. And the women would have been in the minority. And the more we talked about it, the more I would think that these men would’ve come in as a result of Mel’s inviting them; that sports would’ve been probably the topic of conversation; that the status of the latest black barnstorming baseball team would have been what they were talking about. These were definitely not what your question hints at. It would have been simply very innocent.

Arbona: Well, I’m curious. What would be the polite thing to do? How would people go about dancing? Would somebody ask somebody out for a dance, or how would that work?

02-00:46:24 Soskin: I think the dancing would have been incidental and that there never would’ve been more than two or three people on the dance floor. I think the conversation would—in fact I know that the conversation was probably key. Those kids would’ve been talking about their families or what they left behind. Because the young people who would’ve gathered at my house would’ve been Californians. The people who were the guests would have been from different cultures, from different communities, from places beyond what we would have known; that there would’ve been a lot to talk about besides—I think what we shared was probably a common songbook; that the music would have been the uniter. We would all have been listening to the same records; that our songbook was not the songbook of the white people, who would’ve been singing The White Cliffs of Dover, and we’d have been listening to Slim Gaillard. [laughs] There were cultural differences, and that that might have been what the hunger in those kids would have been, was for zapping into that culture. And we would have been curious about what they were bringing with them. I’d never heard basic blues before, except maybe my grandfather, when I was gardening with him when I was a kid. But I didn’t recognize those as blues, or even folk songs; I thought they were Papa George songs. But that became what I heard from the migrants who were coming in, was a Papa George connection.

Arbona: Would people pop in with their own records?

02-00:48:21 Soskin: No. African Americans were very— That’s why we went into business. Black music was very, very hard to come by. And Aldo Musso, who was an Italian man who owned the property that we purchased, the duplex in which we lived, had built that house for his wife when he married, and loved Mel and I because Mel, at the age of twenty-three, had saved up enough money to pay a 30

down payment on a property. We moved into a duplex that Mel bought when we were married. I’m twenty and he’s twenty-three, and with paper routes and all that sort of thing, had saved up enough money to buy the house. Which says something about the stability of this kid and this marriage. And Musso so admired this in him. And he had a juke box route, and he would take Mel out during the day to service those boxes. Some of them were in the emerging black communities. And it was Aldo Musso who had the sources for finding those race records, which they were called, in among the jobbers, the one- stops, that were bringing them in from the South.

And it was this that launched Mel, who decided that there was a business to be created here by opening up a retail store where those could be purchased by this new population that was coming in that had the demand for this. And so our introduction to those young people from Port Chicago would have fed that; that they were bringing tastes and music discoveries from the South that—we knew who Duke Ellington was and Erskine Hawkins and Jimmie Lunceford and all of these greats; but there was a whole genre of African American music that we didn’t know. And they were bringing this with them. So that there were things that made those parties—and I don’t remember there being that many—comfortable for us. There were things that we were learning from one another. So that dancing wouldn’t have been—it was socializing, the conversations. It was that stuff.

Arbona: I’m curious about the conversations because of so much that we read today about Port Chicago and the conditions and the lack of safety. Was that discussed? Was that in the conversation? No?

02-00:51:00 Soskin: I don’t remember them. That’s only something I’ve discovered after the fact. No, I wish I could shed light on that. I know when I read Dr. [Robert L.] Allen’s book, I kept wanting to fill in blanks with the current Betty. But at that time, I was not politically aware enough to even be listening for that. I would not have been—the things that struck me about Dr. Allen’s book was that Joe was only twenty-three and he was a leader of those men. Which reinforced the notion that those kids were just kids.

Arbona: Joe Small.

02-00:51:39 Soskin: Yeah. And he was only twenty-three and he was one of the elders in there, among those groups. There was another story, and I don’t know whether it’s turned up in any interviews or my blog; maybe you’ve read it. But I remember as a ranger, of sitting in at the first day of remembrance at Port Chicago as a ranger. Or maybe I was not yet.

Stein: The memorial was inaugurated in ’94? 31

02-00:52:18 Soskin: No, I would not have been aware of the memorial in ’94. I had blocked, pretty much, that era out. I was reintroduced to that whole period as a field representative for a member of the California State Assembly, because the State of California owned the property under the Ford plant and the Ford plant was built on air rights. So that I was sitting in and became aware of the park, even of Port Chicago, at the time, because I had lived whole decades and decade of life beyond that World War II period, which was now painless to remember. So I’d pretty much wiped that out.

But that first day of remembrance, I remember seeing the first two rows that had signs on them that they were reserved for the survivors of Port Chicago. And there were only two, I think, African Americans in those seats as they began to file in. And I didn’t understand why, because by now I had at least become familiar with the Port Chicago story because I was now involved with the park. And why were there not more survivors? And I had read Robert Allen’s book, and he was the speaker for that year, the keynoter. And there was a member of the National Park Foundation out of Washington, DC, which is involved with African-American aspects of the story. She was sitting next to me. And at one point, I remember turning to her and asking her if she could see why there were not—why were they all white? And as people began to testify, when the keynote speaker was gone and people began to jump up to talk about their experiences, they were all survivors of the town of Port Chicago.

So their memories were of being in the theater, of being in bed, having their walls collapse and windows shot out. And then I remembered that Robert Allen’s book spoke of the men at Port Chicago, and that I didn’t remember men; I only remembered boys. And that I suddenly realized that what was being remembered was dependent upon who was in the room; and that history doesn’t necessarily do a disservice to African-American memory, as much as it is dependent upon who’s in the room. And that in time, who was in the room was going to be dominated by the town of Port Chicago; and that the African American story, even though there were 202 men lost, was going to simply be covered over—not by design, but by circumstance; and that those men were too young to have left survivors. And that the fact that they were boys was key; that those kids who had been in my house were not married, they would not have fathered children; and that now in whatever this year, 2006 or 2007 or whatever this was, the remnants of those lives were suddenly going to be lost. And that it was terribly important that as a participant in the creation of this park, if it was going to be a park—because at that time, it was only a monument—I needed to be a surrogate survivor; that that history was dependent upon people like me remembering. And that that’s often how history happens; that it’s not that people don’t want to remember, it’s that circumstances crowd out truth.

Stein: We have five minutes left on this. 32

Arbona: One question I’ll ask, maybe that we can do in these five minutes. Did you follow the mutiny trial in the papers?

02-00:57:16 Soskin: No. As I say, it’s awfully tempting to speak from the politically savvy Betty Soskin of today. That woman that I was, was not politically active at that point. Now, I did become, over the next twenty years, along with everybody else—as I said in my article, that this became the cauldron for social change, and I was it. I really do feel that I was contemporary to all those changes as they developed. And yes, I did become that. But in that period, I would not have been—I would’ve been aware of the unrest, I would’ve been involved—. I would’ve been probably aware of the protests. I since have seen pictures of people protesting outside of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, African Americans with signs with NAACP. I would have been aware of those. There is a photograph, an E.F. Joseph photograph that exists in part of the things in the present collection. I don’t know when I became aware of those. I don’t know, again, since I moved into the suburbs—in 1950, I would’ve probably moved into the suburbs. I don’t know whether some of that turmoil happened after I was out of the city. But I don’t know how, given my later activism, that would escape me, but I can’t recall that.

Arbona: Maybe now’s a good point to switch tapes.

Begin Audiofile 3 06-25-2010.mp3

Arbona: So this is now tape number three, on June 25, 2010. And I’m here with Betty Reid Soskin. This is Javier Arbona. You’ve told us that you blocked out Port Chicago for a while. But you went back to it. And in your previous oral history, you talk about going back during—I suppose it’s the sixties?

03-00:00:37 Soskin: Yeah.

Arbona: Can you talk about what brought you back there?

03-00:00:41 Soskin: I don’t remember how I came about it. Probably it was related to bringing up children. My mentor during those early activist years was a Unitarian minister named Aron Gilmartin, who was—

Stein: How do you spell that?

03-00:01:09 Soskin: G-I-L-M-A-R-T-I-N, A-R-O-N was Aron. I can figure out that he was an active Socialist. He must’ve been. People have told me that I’m a Marxist. I have never understood even what a Marxist is, except that whatever it is, Gil has [laughs] claims on my conversion. But he was also a close friend of Norman Cousins. His credentials, in terms of activism—he was a member of 33

Ethical Culture before coming here. He was an uncompromising liberal progressive. And I don’t know whether I learned from him in words or by inference, that a belief was not valid unless acted upon; that that’s how one activates a belief. And in trying to pass that on to my children, whenever a social problem out there occurred—and this was probably during the sixties and maybe before that, even—and I think now that maybe it was already embedded in my psyche, because of the fact that I was able to deal with those people in Pleasant Hill head on; that it must’ve been there anyway.

But it led me into a series of political acts that involved standing with others on the roadway to Port Chicago, in a protest, twice. The first time, I flunked activism. [laughs] The first time, I went out there on my own. And this was because I wanted—by now, I knew that my son Bob had become politically active because we’d run into each other at the Oakland Induction Center. [they laugh] He had cut school. And I was being driven, in part, by Bobby’s political activism as much as my own, because I needed to prove myself. So that I was sort of out of my generation, acting out in Bob’s generation. Because this was Vietnam protests, right? So that Bob was turning up in lots and lots of places. And he didn’t turn up at Port Chicago. But I knew that there was an action going by Quakers. So I drove out there. Maybe so I could tell Bob. [laughs] But there were maybe a dozen people that I didn’t know standing along the roadside. Not interfering, but challenging the trucks as they went by, by their presence.

And while I was there, a young African-American teenager turned up. None of these people were speaking, so they may have all been strangers to one another. Maybe all motivated by the same thing I was. I didn’t know anybody there, and I didn’t hear any conversations. But it was a vigil. We were clearly individuals who were acting on principle. And this kid, who was obviously very much younger than the rest of us, took his place separate and apart from the others. Maybe because he was from Pittsburgh; I don’t know where he was. But maybe because we were all grownups. Maybe it was just that. But he, I recall distinctly, standing back about maybe six feet over and three feet back from the rest of the line. And I was at the other end of the line. And trucks began to come by. No, cars began to come by. This was a Sunday afternoon. And cars began to come by. And there would be families of them, whole families, holding up their middle fingers at those of us standing on the—. And I remember wondering how people could do that, with children. And they would scream out obscenities. And here were all these people going by. And I was struggling. I remember that being my first action, I think against Vietnam or supporting the peace action or whatever it was, and wondering how people could do that with their families. This was a family outing, obviously. And they were going by screaming insults at us. And I couldn’t escape the notion that something I was doing was causing that.

It was really, really a struggle for me to stay there, because I felt like I was making those people do that. And it may have been, also the fact that I was 34

coming out of—either going into or coming out of—a real mental break. But I can remember those feelings. And finally a truck coming by—the trucks would travel as close as they could to us without striking us. And those people that I was standing with would not give an inch. And I was falling back each time. And I can remember the trauma even now, of not knowing what a war was like; realizing I’d never been in a war and I didn’t know what war was, but I knew what a truck was and I was afraid of those trucks. And at one point, when I stood back and I saw this kid, who had never been in the frontline, but standing back, he was fingering a knife. And I knew these were Quakers that I was with that were defying this thing, this drama that was happening in front, and that they didn’t know that he was armed. And I knew that that kid could have—that we were all on the same side.

But how these fit together, how those families driving by with their obscenities and those servicemen who were going by in their trucks and these Quakers who were standing there on the road, how it all fit together became overwhelming, and I ran. I was in tears. I got into my car, and I drove to my church, and I told Aron Gilmartin that I flunked, [they laugh] that I had absolutely failed. And he said, “Only for the moment, Betty. You will go back.” And he was that kind of person. And I did go back. But I went back and it was years later. I don’t even remember.

But it was also at Port Chicago that I returned to, the day after a Unitarian man had had his legs severed by a train. And I went back there as more of a mature adult, having lived a lot of episodes in my life; having more of a conviction about the war, about all wars; of being more sure of myself; of being older; of being confronted and going through realities that I did not think I could have survived. And that day, I was able to stand with—there weren’t that many of us; there may have been three or four. But all standing. Now I knew that I was standing there, right?, but I don’t know whether his name was Brian. Is it?

Arbona: I assume you’re referring to Brian Willson.

03-00:10:08 Soskin: Yes. Never knew him before or since. I since did see him at the Berkeley Unitarian Fellowship some years later. But I didn’t know him at the time. But isn’t it funny? His name came to me just before you said it. And he’s not someone I knew.

Arbona: It’s yeah, Brian.

03-00:10:28 Soskin: That is wild.

Arbona: Yeah. Willson, with two L’s, W-I-L-L-S-O-N. 35

03-00:10:33 Soskin: That is wild. How’d that come up for me? But that’s when I really had it worked out, and I was able to stand my ground. For him. And because of rightness and the position of anti-war. And that shuts the book on Port Chicago for me. Until I became a park ranger. And that all began to open up. And by now, the war has ended, the Vietnam war’s over and we’d confronted a lot of stuff. And now that’s been made a national park.

Arbona: Going back a little bit to this Willson episode, did you find out—this is in 1987.

03-00:11:30 Soskin: That when it was?

Arbona: Yeah.

03-00:11:32 Soskin: Yeah, well, I told you it was years later.

Arbona: And this is during the Central American—well, this Iran-Contra, around that time. Reagan’s in the White House.

03-00:11:41 Soskin: Isn’t that bizarre? So, yeah. So a lot had gone down since that initial Port Chicago experience. It wasn’t just Vietnam, it was Nixon, it was the whole—. Oh, and meanwhile—I don’t know whether before or since—I was invited to be an artist in residence at a meeting of the SDS students at Colorado Springs. This was after Kent State. And they had gone there to protest Nixon’s speech at the US Air Force Academy. I don’t remember the year. I was invited as one—. [laughs] That’s another time. Bob, who was living in Big Sur, turned up at the conference and his mother was there. [laughs] Oh, my God. But I was one of only six adults that they had chosen to join them for a week at Colorado Springs. One was Ric Masten, poet from Big Sur. I think Rennie Gaines, who was a part of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s operation. He since has acquired an African name, which I don’t remember anymore. I think it was David Rendl-hast, of Ontario. I don’t remember any of the others. But anyway, there was that week period at Colorado Springs. And I don’t know whether that was before—I imagine that that was since, that Nixon would not have—

Arbona: No, it would’ve been before.

03-00:13:43 Soskin: It would’ve been Reagan that would’ve been—when Brian Willson’s thing, right?

Arbona: ’87, yes. 36

03-00:13:49 Soskin: Okay, then this was under Nixon, because Nixon—they were protesting the speech at the Air Force Academy. So that that had to be even later.

Arbona: And they went to Port Chicago to protest.

03-00:14:01 Soskin: Who?

Arbona: The six you mentioned during that Nixon speech, [inaudible].

03-00:14:05 Soskin: [over Arbona] No, no, no, this was in Colorado Springs. They had invited me to their—it was a national conference, a continental conference. There were kids from all over the country. And some of them had been at Kent State. So that was after Kent State. It was the same year. But I seem to have been in all of these iconic situations all along the line. By no design. And almost, except for Bobby, alone. [they laugh] Don’t know how Bob feels about that.

Arbona: Now, why did you go back in ’87?

03-00:14:54 Soskin: Go back?

Arbona: To Port Chicago.

03-00:14:56 Soskin: Because of Brian. I read about it in the paper. And it may have been that I knew that he was a Unitarian, so I might have heard it from inside the Unitarian community. Maybe he was a speaker at some Unitarian event later on. I don’t know whether he—my guess is that he was either a Unitarian or a fellow traveler with us. [laughs] A lot of my activism was coming out of the fact that I was in a community of activists in the Unitarian denomination.

Arbona: And then the memorial happens.

03-00:15:39 Soskin: Yeah. Then the memorial happens.

Arbona: Later on.

03-00:15:42 Soskin: And that day of remembrance brought—and all of those seemed to be singularly iconic. All of those things, even though years apart, lead to the same thing, same reality. The rightness of my being involved there as a park ranger. There’s some kind of authenticity about that. I tend to think of it only as minimally involved in Port Chicago, and based in that party. But I hadn’t remembered these other events until now. So that there’s not been that one connection to Port Chicago, there’s been several. 37

Arbona: Several.

03-00:16:38 Soskin: And mostly pretty traumatic.

Arbona: Yeah, I can’t really figure out a way of asking this question, but it’s just fascinating how the site brings together so many different threads.

03-00:16:55 Soskin: Oh, yeah. Sure.

Arbona: And that you’ve participated in those. Those threads have also been a part of your life.

03-00:17:01 Soskin: Yeah. And I don’t know what the answer to that is. Some of those threads I hadn’t connected until now, in the telling. Because they’ve not been evoked by anything. There’s been no way to connect them. I have done the day of remembrance on my blog. And even now, they’re unfolding. As I was saying, I guess on the day of the tour, that it wasn’t until I was speaking at the US Customs House in San Francisco that I looked at that DVD that I put together that incorporates that Joseph photo of the caskets, and suddenly saw the missing flags. So that’s still unfolding. That story is still unfolding for me. And my suspicion is that some researcher is going to feed into that narrative at some point, using that photograph as proof that those people could not have gotten a fair trial.

Arbona: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that photo?

03-00:18:11 Soskin: That photo, there’s an E.F. Joseph photo. And we maybe need to get some background. E.F. Joseph was an African American, was actually from the island of Santa Lucia. He was from a Caribbean island. And he settled in the Bay Area in the twenties, and took everything related to African Americans, all social activities and political activities, until the mid-seventies, when he died. Among those photographs is one taken at Port Chicago—no, taken at Port Chicago, but taken after the explosion—of a portion of the twenty-two caskets in which the remains of African-American—. Now, how they told African Americans from any others, I don’t know, because they were all fragments of bodies. But they were buried in twenty-two caskets, in the colored section of Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Francisco.

There is an African American [inaudible]. Now, that comes out of the fact that blacks and whites were traditionally separated, even after death, and that the national cemeteries also were—gathered in the photograph are people who I recognize as being African American union officials from Boilermakers Auxiliary 36, that I worked for. So that those men—Mahlon Roles, who was the secretary-treasurer of that auxiliary, Boilermakers A-36; Spencer Jordan, 38

who was his assistant; Reverend Smith, who was the uncle of Mahlon Roles— are the three African Americans. They are standing with other Boilermaker Union Auxiliary members or officials and some Kaiser Permanente people. Now, because I’m of that era, I recognize those people. So I knew what that is. And there are a portion of the twenty-two caskets.

I went online after this revelation of these caskets being missing their flags, and looked at the inscription that’s at Golden Gate cemetery site, and saw that in the graphic on the website, it talks about the general who’s buried there, the other people who were buried there at Golden Gate Fields; now, it’s not the colored section. And it mentions, give a couple sentences to the Italian American, German prisoners of war who died in captivity, who were also buried there. And then, as an afterthought, also buried in this cemetery, in the colored section, are the twenty-two caskets of—and it says twenty-two, I think—buried as unknowns in the cemetery, without mentioning that there were 320 or whatever it was who died, without mentioning an explosion, without mentioning that they’re even sailors. The only reason we know that is because they were court-martialed, which meant that they were servicemen. But in this, it says African Americans. They could’ve been stevedores. Right? It doesn’t mention that there was an explosion.

And I suddenly began to see what was missing in the inscription on the website. And when I’m watching from the dark, the presentation of this thing which I’ve created and which I’ve been through so many times, and suddenly thought, there are not flags over those caskets, and began to wonder why. And where are the remains of the white servicemen who died, also? Civilians or maritime or whoever, sailors. There were 196 of those or whatever it was. Are they also here? And are there photographs? And were those caskets flag draped? So those questions, even after all these years, began to haunt me, much as Richert haunts me at this site. That there are undisclosed facts about Port Chicago that I connect to, and I don’t know why. And that story is incomplete, and probably will be even when I die. But maybe some of them are embedded in my memory; I don’t know. I don’t know how it would figure.

But since those attitudes that prevailed at the time would not have allowed them to be identified as sailors, who would not have been honored with flag- draped caskets, that may suggest the fact that those remaining survivors should be exonerated, because they could not have received a fair trial. And maybe that photograph is proof of that, that it indicates the attitude that prevailed in those years. And I think it’s an important question for somebody to research, because we need photographs of the white people who survived— I mean who were lost, and to see how they compare.

Arbona: Wow, there’s so much to unpack. 39

03-00:24:39 Soskin: Yeah, but those are stories that are untold, and they really are fascinating. And we really need some graduate students to start delving into some of that stuff.

Arbona: I think I have one other question that’s somewhat—I don’t mean to deviate from that last thought—

03-00:24:56 Soskin: No, fine.

Arbona: —but I guess that I was interested in hearing about how you’ve gone back to the site now these last few years. And I was wondering if you’ve met George Miller, for example.

03-00:25:09 Soskin: Oh, yes.

Arbona: And maybe to ask you to reflect on his work, and perhaps there’s other people that you’d like to mention that also come to mind, with him.

03-00:25:22 Soskin: Yeah. As I said, and it really wasn’t just in passing, I’ve become more aware. Or at least it’s been confirmed for me in these later years, maybe in the past decade, mainly, that there have always been people trying to get it right. George Miller’s one of those. Dion Aroner is another of those. They’ve been in and out of government and they’ve been in and out of power positions. But they date back as far as the fact that there was a ship built in the Richmond shipyards by Henry Kaiser that was named for Toussaint L’Ouverture. Would you not like to see a copy of the transcripts of the discussions that went into how that was arrived at? We’re still fighting the Haitian revolution. I mean, literally.

And that is an example of people trying to get it right. I think that there have always been those. I think that our current President is trying to get it right. Whether or not he dominates is whether or not the supports that he needs to be there; whether or not people like me—. And I really think it’s my job. [laughs] I really think it’s my job. And I don’t know when I came to that. But it’s my job to create pressure on the people with the power; that I may not prevail, but that I am leaning in the direction of positive social change, with unseen others. And it’s my faith in those unseen others that are out there trying to get it right that keeps me strong. It really, really does. If there’s any faith in this, it’s in that, that there are those people. And I may not be aware of who they are, but they’ve always existed. And someday there’s going to be a critical mass of us. [laughs] And it waxes and wanes; sometimes we’re in and out of power. But the “we” of me is always out there. And that if I don’t do it, it’s not going to be done, because my voice is needed. And I may not ever be able to see where those supports are, who they are. I may not recognize them, but they’re there. And I do really, really, really feel empowered. 40

Arbona: In what way would you like to see that Port Chicago chapter developed?

03-00:28:34 Soskin: I think it’s still going to be true that what gets remembered is dependent upon those doing the remembering. I think that we’re in danger, or have been in danger, of having that commemoration based upon the loss—the generations who have succeeded those of the experience being those who are remembering. So the explosion at Port Chicago and the destruction of the town of Port Chicago will move to the forefront—. Unless we can revive the history of those men and what they went through, using the trials of exoneration, which should sometime come up because there are people interested in seeing that those come, because those will expose the stories of those boys who were lost. And because of their unintended gift to us, which was that was the trigger that caused President Truman to desegregate the armed forces; that the role that they played, even by being destroyed, fed into the desegregation of the armed forces, which subsequently led into the entire dismantling of the system of—. And we wax and wane; we go back and forth. Right now we’ve got some regression.

But Port Chicago plays a pivotal role in that. I think it triggered the modern Civil Rights Movement, that I think began with the response to Port Chicago, because that’s where African Americans said, we will not be backed up any further than this. That’s where people began to not accept the status quo. Also that by happenstance, the city of Berkeley began to change visibly. And this is something I experienced. I remember when Mr. DeBonis, Charles DeBonis, the ultraconservative of Berkeley, who was on the city council—. And that Berkeley could have been described as being like any other Midwestern town, as conservative; but that because this was the place that was on the edge of everything—that we were on the edge of the Pacific, we were on the edge of scientific change; we were the birth of the atom bomb, we’re the birthplace of the United Nations—. This is where everything happened, from the World War—the beginning of that war until its end and until the twenty years that followed that; that we became that cauldron. But people began to converge on Berkeley because it was believed to be the change agent, the liberal capital of the world. And they made it so, by a self-fulfilling prophecy. They came in such large numbers that they made it what they believed it already was. And I watched that transformation. It was one of the most exciting things I think I’ve ever seen. And even in the happening of it, I seemed to be aware that it was happening. I was recording it. I have papers in my files, where I was standing—I was standing in the crowd when S.I. Hayakawa was, with his bullhorn, on top of San Francisco State, with people who were protesting.

All of those things I was watching happen close up. And I watched—and that’s what this article was about—I watched the greater Bay Area become the catalyst for a change which is still occurring. We began to lead the nation and the world in social change. It radiated out from this nexus. And still does. UC Berkeley is, of course, not nearly as progressive as it was during those 41

years, and there’s been that kind of regression, but we’ve never dropped back as far. And we’ll always have those pulsations. But it’s amazing. And my life has paralleled that.

Arbona: And so your hunch is that also Port Chicago had a big part of that.

03-00:32:33 Soskin: It was the catalyst. It’s my belief that Port Chicago really did trigger, by making visible those things which, up until then, had been accepted. Eleanor Roosevelt was doing her thing, in terms of social change, even before her husband was; but he was sort of going along as far as he could, without changing anything, really. The GI Bill, as I say, was not effective. The changes put into employment practices were never enforced. A. Philip Randolph’s confrontation with Roosevelt did not yield very much. They were in name only. But Port Chicago, it really did become the catalyst. This was the game changer. I think that we’re going to find, when the academics take it on, when you take it on, that a lot of what happens consequently came out of Port Chicago. It really did. And I’m just convinced that those men’s lives were not wasted; that they were sacrificed, but that they were not wasted; that they did really, really trumpet—they dictated the next twenty years of social change. We were being asked before then, as African Americans, to fight, to work, and even die for social changes which we would not enjoy for another twenty years. And many were doing that. Many were doing that. That’s amazing, when you really think about what African Americans withstood over the following twenty years. And I am convinced. That is what Port Chicago means to me.

Arbona: So I could keep asking questions all day, but I worry that it’s been already a long morning.

03-00:36:11 Soskin: I really don’t even have any idea what time it is. [they laugh]

Stein: Pause for a minute?

Arbona: Yeah, we could pause.