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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. ********************************* 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 1 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.

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