Betty Reid Soskin Featured at OEB NOW's Black History Month Event

Betty Reid Soskin, Black social activist of the 50's and California Woman of the Year award winner in 1995 will be the featured speaker at Oakland Eastbay NOW's offering for Black History Month.

Saturday. February 2nd  2-4pm  Rockridge Library, 5366 College Ave., Oakland, CA (just 5 blocks from the BART station).

Soskin's on-going career as a cultural antrhopologist and writer began in Berkeley where she initated the overhaul of a drug and crime-infested neighborhood and continues today as history librarian at the Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, CA, the site of the Kaiser shipyards that brought thousands of women, of all colors, to asist in the heretofore male-only occupation of shipbuilding memorialized in the "We Can Do It!" poster.

The 86-year-old Soskin will relate what is was like for Black Americans growing up in the East Bay from 1927 when she arrived with her family from Louisiana as victims of a Katrina-like hurricane which destroyed their home and business. Many years later she married into the pioneer Reid family that had escaped from slavery to the haven of California during the Civil War.

She, like many Black Americans like her, faced a lifetime of racial prejudice leading to a mid-life crisis, an experience which, she says, opened up  new avenues to recover--singing, painting and creating music--resulting in her recognition that there is a universality shared with everyone else on the planet.

Event co-sponsors include the California Women's Agenda and Oakland-Piedmont League of Women Voters.