North Wichita News

Centenarian park ranger will be part of KIPCOR Film Series event

The third film in this year's KIPCOR Film Series, Sunday, Feb. 19, will include something rare – the (virtual) presence of the film's subject, Betty Reid Soskin, for the talkback session following the film.

No Time to Waste: The Urgent Mission of Betty Reid Soskin is tailor-made for Black History Month but relates a story for all seasons.

It screens Feb. 19 at 2 p.m. in Krehbiel Auditorium in Luyken Fine Arts Center on the Bethel campus. Soskin herself will be present via Zoom after the film to talk about her experience and answer questions. 

No Time to Waste is a 52-minute documentary directed by Carl Bidleman.

Until she retired in March 2022 at the age of 100, Soskin was the oldest active ranger in the National Park Service (NPS), working at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif.

Soskin began in the position at the age of 85, after serving on the park planning committee. That was when Soskin realized the park was on track to present a whitewashed version of history.

It wasn’t that there was any kind of deliberate intent, Soskin told a reporter for Glamour magazine (which gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018). “There was simply no one in that room [until I showed up] with any reason to know [my history].”

Because of Soskin, the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front park’s formal narrative now includes the 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were placed in internment camps by the government, as well as the 320 sailors and workers, 202 of them Black men, who died in munitions explosions at nearby Port Chicago in 1944.

As an NPS ranger, Soskin’s storytelling illuminated the invisible histories of African Americans and other people of color, and has changed the way the NPS conveys this history to audiences across the United States.

No Time to Waste captures her fascinating life. Soskin knew her great-grandmother, who was born enslaved, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and lived to be 102.

Soskin experienced a WWII segregated union hall as a young woman, and had a multi-faceted career as a singer, activist, mother and legislative representative in addition to park planner and ranger.

Soskin has been interviewed by hundreds of media and other groups, among them Anderson Cooper, the Commonwealth Club and The Moth, in addition to Glamour. She has received numerous awards, including the National Parks Conservation Association’s Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, and a Presidential Medal presented to her by Barack Obama in 2015.

While she worked as a ranger, Soskin would wear her uniform everywhere she went, because she was “making every little girl of color aware of a career choice she may not have known she had.”

KIPCOR, the Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Bethel College, sponsors the series each school year.

The KIPCOR Film Series is free and open to the public, with a freewill offering taken to support KIPCOR and the series.

The final film in the 2022-23 series will be Thirst for Justice on Sunday, April 16.

Bethel is a four-year liberal arts college founded in 1887 and is the oldest Mennonite college in North America. Known for academic excellence, Bethel ranks at #14 in the Washington Monthly list of “Best Bachelor’s Colleges,” and #24 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of “Best Regional Colleges Midwest,” both for 2022-23. Bethel is the only Kansas college or university to be named a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center. For more information, see www.bethelks.edu

Original source can be found here.