Millstone Times July 2022

Women of National Parks Celebrates 104 Years

change and civic participation and in promoting Black excellence through her public leadership. Today her home in Richmond and the Council House in DC where Walker’s friend, Mary McLeod Bethune, worked with the National Council of Negro Women are also units of the National Park System. Sue Kunitomi Embrey | Manzanar National Historic Site Like Maggie Walker, Sue Kunitomi Embrey understood the need to recognize and protect places that are powerful parts of our national memory and used her civic voice to advocate for those places. And, like Walker, this knowledge came from personal experience.

Children at Manzanar in 1942 (Photo by Dorothea Lange, NPS collection)

Embrey was born in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, in 1923. When she was 14, her father was killed in a truck accident, and her mother struggled to provide for her eight children. After high school, Embrey stayed home to help her mother run their family store. In 1942, after the start of World War II, the federal government ordered more than 110,000 men, women, and children—none convicted of espionage or sabotage—to leave their homes and detained them in remote, military-style camps. Embrey and her family were sent to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of 10 camps where Japanese American citizens and resident Japanese aliens were incarcerated during the war. She was 19. After the war, she went to college and received a master’s in education. In 1969, Embrey attended the first Manzanar pilgrimage and spoke publicly about her wartime experience. Then, as the co-founder of the Manzanar Committee and eventual chair of the board, Embrey organized the next 37 pilgrimages and successfully led the campaign that resulted in Manzanar becoming a California historic landmark in 1972 and a unit of the National Park System in 1992. Sue Kunitomi Embrey passed away in 2006 at the age of 83. Throughout her life, Embrey served as an advocate for preserving and remembering Japanese American incarceration narratives. In Embrey’s opinion, conserving Manzanar and retelling the stories of the WWII Japanese American incarceration camps are important to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. “It might happen to another group of people or people with different political beliefs,” she said. “And it’s important for us to remember that we have a Constitution, a written document that is only good when people make use of it. And they have to use it, and not abuse it.” Embrey dedicated her adult life to civil rights and to honoring the stories of Manzanar, noting “Liberty is something very precious we all need to work for and to strengthen.” Betty Reid Soskin | Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park

At 98, the National Park Service’s oldest serving park ranger, Betty Reid Soskin, knows well the park that she serves. She knew it when the park idea was forming and long be fore that. She was a Home Front worker in a place that became Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park. Soskin was born in Detroit, but her parents were from Louisiana. She lived in New Orleans as a child. Her great-grandmother, who lived to be 102, was born into slavery. Soskin’s family moved to Oakland, California, when she was a girl. She tells the story of taking the train to and from Louisiana to visit family, noting that there was a point along the trip when Black customers had to move to the back of the train. During World War II, Soskin worked in Richmond, California, as a clerk in the Boil

NPS photo

ermakers Union A-36, a Jim Crow all-Black union auxiliary. As the war effort meant that women joined factory workforces, they were celebrated on posters as Rosie the Riveter. But, as Soskin noted, the advertising campaign reflected “a white woman’s narrative” and excluded the very different Home Front experiences of Black women and other women of color who contributed greatly to the war effort across the U.S. “What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering,” says Soskin. As a new park began to take shape in the old shipyards of Richmond to recognize the home-front role of Rosie the Riveter, Soskin was in the room. As a staffer for local state assembly members, she was involved in the park planning effort and ensured that it reflected a wide diversity of stories, including hers. Today, as a ranger at the park, Soskin continues to use her voice, telling her story as a personal reflection of the broad African American experience and what it means for our nation’s future. For each of these women, and countless others before them and still to come, their engagement and advocacy sprang from their passion and vision for these important places. Their accomplishments and the protection of these places resulted when they raised their public voices and led the charge...just like the suffragists’ work itself ensured that women’s voices would not be silenced.

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