Betty Reid Soskin | Interview 3 | November 11, 2002

WILMOT: Good morning, November 11, Betty Soskin Interview three. Can you say a few words Betty?

SOSKIN: This is also Betty. [laughing]

WILMOT: If you want to just put them in your lap, I don't want you to be concerned with those. [referring to microphones] Okay.

SOSKIN: They are pretty sensitive then right?

WILMOT: They are extremely sensitive. Let me make sure I'm not giving a little bit too much sound there.

SOSKIN: Okay.

WILMOT: Well, let's see. On last Thursday, we closed with a question of where did you and your husband, Mel, go for entertainment and you showed me some beautiful photos.

SOSKIN: Yeah. We really had a very rich social life. Rich in terms of what? There were lots of parties, there were lots of formal kinds of dances. Sometimes 00:01:00at the universities, sometimes at the Masonic Temple, which was in Oakland on 30th down sort in the edge of West Oakland. It was the Prince Hall chapter of the--which was the black auxiliary of the Masons. There was a hall there that was used for--in fact, the photo that I showed you, is I think out of that place.

WILMOT: The one with you and your husband and the woman standing.

SOSKIN: Yes. But there were lots of, you know, coming out parties, literally formal coming out parties for girls as they turned eighteen. It was very special. I guess some of this came out from the South, middle class practices of Southern refugees [laughing], people who settled out here. There were lots of 00:02:00dances at the International House on Campus often usually by the AKAs or the Deltas or some of the sororities. We would go as far away as San Jose where the Riggs family lived, a family that I don't know how many years that they were there. But their grandson of the elder Riggs is the race car driver, Willie T. His aunts and his mother were our contemporaries and they were part of the social group. We did weekend kinds of things, pretty well chaperoned as we were younger, but as we grew older, we continued the same social groups. When we married, that group sort of broke off. Mel and I lived in Berkeley, but in a few 00:03:00short years after our children came, we moved to Walnut Creek. So we weren't a part of that group anymore socially or otherwise pretty much. But during our early married life, during our teens, we were very active socially.

WILMOT: You mentioned this, there's two questions that come from the other list, you mentioned this in Masonic Temple, now there was also one in-- do you remember there's this one over in East Oakland by Fruitvale Bart?

SOSKIN: I wasn't aware of that when I was growing up.

WILMOT: I'm just asking out of curiosity, because I was wondering about it.

SOSKIN: See the interesting thing is that one came into my life much, much later, because I worked for two three years with Rafiq when he was running the Upper Room there. That's when I got to know that place. When Rafiq's health failed, I was sort of an interim director of the Upper Room, along with some 00:04:00other people. That's when I was introduced to the hip hop world [laughing], which I'm fascinated by.

WILMOT: Yeah? What do you find fascinating about it?

SOSKIN: Oh, so much! That's a whole day in itself! That's what I mean about having the sense of having been contemporary in all the periods of my life, that I was as deeply involved and as interested in the poets and the original rappers and KRS1 and all of these people, that it was a fascinating time.

WILMOT: It's interesting too that like your niece, she works in that world.

SOSKIN: Which one? Who?

WILMOT: I'm thinking of Danyel?

SOSKIN: Oh, Danyel? Yeah. She did a lot of writing, oh sure! She has a new book coming out in January.

WILMOT: The other question that came to me out of that was, so in your 00:05:00early-married life also coincided with the changing landscape of your community as a result of the influx of migration from South. I wanted to ask did that impact the way your social venues looked?

SOSKIN: My social venue was changing anyway, that had a tremendous impact, because I was married in May of 1942, which was just six months after the war started and after the influx of people began. And at that point, we were living in Berkeley--the memory of that period is so tumultuous, kind of. I'm sure there 00:06:00were tremendous impacts but I don't know how much it was going to be credited to simply going from being a single young woman at nineteen to becoming a young married woman, moving from East Oakland where I had grown and into Berkeley, which was a different life even then. Growing up in a world that was pretty diverse without working at it, I mean it just sort of was, into a world now that was divided racially, it was fast becoming divided racially. So all of those things, you know, there were mixed impacts of all this and my social life was affected by that.

The other thing was that Mel and I were both identifying--we're forced to identify with what about us was black culture, which was not really the black 00:07:00culture that was moving in. It was a different kind of black culture, more fundamentalist, a very, very different kind of--well, as I said before, I had never heard Negro National Anthem. I had never been in a society that was completely segregated. We were segregated by choice; we were with people like ourselves because we wanted to be, at least that's what we thought we were doing. We thought we were being equal.

WILMOT: At the same time, you really talked about the difficulty that your father had finding work, so it sounds like it was complicated.

SOSKIN: Oh sure! Of course! It was very complex; the whole thing was very complex. Then I'm not sure how aware I was that my father's problem of getting work was because of his race. At the time, I was a little girl. I'm not sure at 00:08:00all how much awareness there was of what this was, though I was certainly aware of color, because that was a big thing, you know in my family, and my parents.

WILMOT: When you talk about when you say one community was more fundamentalist, are you referring to the black community that you grew up with or the community that came in?

SOSKIN: No, the community that came in brought with them the black church. I knew there were black churches, but they're not a part of my experience. I was Catholic. So when I say fundamentalist, I'm saying there was another level of black religion. Even though I knew about Father Wallace's church in North Oakland, I knew about Reverend Wilby's church, which is presently Allen Temple, which was even then Allen Temple, I guess. I knew that there were black churches, but these were not a part of my religious life. We were Catholic, and 00:09:00that was a whole other--they were just other. And suddenly, they were the majority. When I was growing up, this was not majority, but in the years after the Second World War, this was the majority.

WILMOT: Did you social life ever extend to Richmond?

SOSKIN: No. It was as if Richmond didn't exist. I didn't really know about Richmond, even though I married someone who had a family member, his father's family--I think there eleven or twelve children and one of them settled in Richmond, and this was Charlie--settled in North Richmond. But the rest of the family was in San Francisco and Berkeley and those were the only one that I knew.

WILMOT: Did you remember as a young, married woman coming into his family get to know Charlie Reid and his wife Beryl?

SOSKIN: No, not at all. There was very little contact, as far as I could tell, between the families. I knew that Mel, who was an athlete, was very fond of his Uncle Charlie. I knew about him sort of mythically, but I didn't know him personally. I think I may have seen him--the family got together traditionally on the fourth of July at Mel's parent's home and that was when my children were little kids.

WILMOT: Where was it?

SOSKIN: That was in Danville; they lived in Danville. But they moved to Danville just a few years before we moved to Walnut Creek and our moving to Walnut Creek was lucky because his parents had moved out to Danville. And there were occasions where I saw Charlie Reid, I didn't know his children and I didn't know Beryl at all.

WILMOT: What precipitated your husband's parents' move out to Danville?

SOSKIN: Well, I think nothing more complicated than the fact that his father 00:11:00wanted to raise a horse or two and they had a couple of acres and he did have a horse and he had a truck garden, and he loved the rural life and that's what they did.

WILMOT: Did you get the sense that they had a welcome experience there as a black family?

SOSKIN: If there was any objection, it was not talked about. My guess is Mel's mother must've purchased the property, because she was very fair-skinned and they wouldn't have known until they were in. Because it was sparsely settled, it wasn't in a well-built up neighborhood, there were only a few houses anywhere near them, it was very rural at the time. I don't remember any talk about there being problems. Now that wasn't true for Mel and I. We moved into Walnut Creek, 00:12:00which was a lot of more neighbors, a lot of more people around to be offended by our presence. But I don't remember there being any particular problems with Mel's family.

WILMOT: When did Richmond become part of your universe?

SOSKIN: Richmond had been the western terminus for the Santa Fe Railroad. It had a history before the Second World War. And it was put on the map pretty much by Henry Kaiser during the Second World War. My sense of--I don't think that Henry Kaiser was the great, you know, reformer, by any means. But he had this imagination that he could build--he could produce merchant ships in five days and he needed bodies to work assembly lines to produce that and he didn't care 00:13:00who those bodies were. So he brought a lot of people, sharecroppers and--you know white and black from Arkansas and Oklahoma and Texas and Louisiana, brought them here--people who were looking for a better life, you know from whoever they were. He put Richmond on the map as a part of that effort. It existed before. I'm sure that Chevron--I think before that was Standard Oil, and they had been here for a long time, the refineries were all here. The surrounding areas, Hercules was a place where they manufactured dynamite, explosives, I mean this was a huge arsenal. That's why there's so many brownfields here now. So much of the ground's contaminated because of the kind of activities that went on there industrially. So Richmond became a people place, you know, during the Second World War, it had been a work site I think for a long time.

I didn't know Richmond then, and there was distance--you have to realize the timeline here--when I was growing up, there were orchards between Oakland and San Leandro. Even today, I mean Richmond, you'd think there was a eucalyptus curtain between Berkeley and Richmond. There are people in Richmond who know nothing about Berkeley. There are people in Richmond who've never been to San Francisco, but on the other hand, I worked with white kids when I was working for the university who lived in Concord who'd never been to San Francisco. So there's a balkanization that happens in the Bay Area, maybe not so much anymore, maybe it's different now. But these were very distinctively different communities. And, as such, there was a distance between West Oakland, East 00:15:00Oakland and North Oakland. It said something when you sited those locations, you know, of who you were and where you lived. The come-late-lies, I think lived pretty much in East Oakland. Berkeley had some very, very long families that have been many, many years--black families out of San Francisco. My first husband's family was a founding member of Third Baptist Church in San Francisco and they are celebrating their hundred and fiftieth birthday this weekend or next weekend. I mean, you know, it's a long time.

WILMOT: When you say you knew Charlie Reid in a mythical way. What was the myth about him?

SOSKIN: His athletic prowess, I mean, this is someone that I knew that Mel Reid 00:16:00adored and wanted to emulate. So I knew about him as an athlete before I ever knew him, and that plays out in the video that you looked at. This was a larger than life kind of man, and he really was. But he didn't ever become a part of my life.

WILMOT: When you went to go work for Local A36, was that your first kind of experience with Richmond?

SOSKIN: Yeah, oh yes! I don't remember, and it must've been before we opened the record shop, certainly, and we opened the store in 1945. So this had to be '43, 00:17:00'44, I'm guessing.

WILMOT: This was after your experience working for the federal--?

SOSKIN: Yeah. We had left, you know, we were out now, and Mel was working part time in the shipyards and the San Pablo Park. It had to be some time, '43, '44, because we went into business in June of '45.

WILMOT: Do you remember what brought you to work there? Why did you decided to go back to work after--?

SOSKIN: I don't really know and my guess is that it had more to do with a friendship. I knew Marguerite and Roland before, and when he was putting that union together, they would've thought of me. We all lived in Berkeley. And at that time, Martha Montgomery and Zola Adams and Marguerite and I were friends. I 00:18:00didn't meet them when I went there. I knew them before. So I think that we sort of moved as a block into doing that.

WILMOT: Did the Rolles', did they live in the same place where I met her before in North Berkeley?

SOSKIN: No, they lived on Ashby Avenue; they lived in a little duplex on Ashby not too terribly far from where our place was. They moved into upper Berkeley later. But they had come out here from Chicago. And I can't remember how I met them, just don't remember.

WILMOT: So you ended up working with--as someone who worked in the auxiliary, how familiar were you with the history of the auxiliary, how it came to be formed?

SOSKIN: Not at all! I was no more aware of where I was except I was filing cards 00:19:00again, because this was not unlike my experience at the Civil Service Commission. It was changing--it was creating cards as people came in, it was filing the cards, it was comparing whether not we had the people already on file or whether there were duplicates, it was changing addresses. It was the same kind of no brain kind of work that I had done at the Civil Service Commission, which I think is why I don't remember that well. It was not an experience that stood out in any way.

WILMOT: It's interesting though, because as someone who's filing employee cards and local auxiliary member cards, were you exposed then to just kind of sense of who was being served by the auxiliary?

SOSKIN: I was aware of that it was African American, oh sure, or colored at that time, yeah. I was very aware of that we were working toward--but the world was 00:20:00becoming--I don't remember that as being exceptional, it was part of all the chaos that was going on. I had watched the people literally coming in, watched the train passed in front of my house, loaded with people coming into the area. And the war effort was an important thing. I don't remember feeling particularly patriotic in that job, you know, that wasn't what it was about. I think I felt that being clerical was a step up from being a housekeeper and, as such, I had attained something, because most of the adult women that were in my mother's group were doing day work. You know, taking care of people's houses. And most of the men were service workers. So I was doing clerical work, which was a kind of 00:21:00a baby step up.

WILMOT: That's what the war brought into your life, you started doing clerical work?

SOSKIN: Yeah.

WILMOT: Can you describe a bit Zola Adams?

SOSKIN: Zola was older than I at the time. She was probably the senior member of this group. She married Earl Adams; they lived in North Oakland just on the edge of Berkeley. She could've been Mexican, olive skin, dark hair. They had one child, Joan Adams Finney who later became appointee--she was the hostess to the reception center at the State Department under Carter, that was Zola's daughter. So even though we were doing that kind of work, if there was an escalator up, we 00:22:00were all sort of on it. Because all of those people did go on do other things that were, you know, higher up than--except that Zola didn't, but Zola's daughter did.

Marguerite was probably more sophisticated than the three of us, than the rest of us. I imagined her to be because she was from Chicago. But she seemed to talk about a more exciting life than the one that we were living, so that I kind of looked to her--she had a wonderful sense of humor, small, slightly built, sort of round and plumpish, but brown-skinned, delightful sense of humor, really fun. I didn't get to know her husband very well, but he was sort of Marguerite's husband--Marguerite was the colorful one in that couple.

Martha Montgomery. Her name was Martha Ford at the time. Very small, she was smaller than I, and I was small. I remember that whole job was being fun. These were three women who didn't take what we were doing very seriously and we seemed to get awful lot of fun out of comparing names on the cards. There were names that were just hilarious to us. That camaraderie is what made that job important to me and it's the only thing I really remember about it. I don't remember protests; I don't remember resentments; I don't remember anyone talking about the fact that it was a black union; I don't remember the political parts of that at all. I was not aware of it. It fit the times that we were getting through, 00:24:00and so it was okay.

Looking back on it, I find resentment. I'm schizophrenic about the Rosie thing, because even now that I have to qualify that I was a non-traditional Rosie, which also sets me out from the mainstream. I feel almost like someone should resurrect that little whatever it was tin building, whatever it was and make part of the exhibit [laughing], because we did a job, we weren't on the ships. I wasn't even aware of the ships; I don't think I ever saw the shipyards. I wasn't even aware of them. We were encapsulated in this one little building.

WILMOT: Are you saying then that you feel like people's understanding of Rosie 00:25:00is kind of narrow and should include the kind of work that you did as well?

SOSKIN: No. I don't think it's a work thing; I think it's a separation thing. I think that it has to do with the fact that it's the one period in my life when I literally worked in a Jim Crow situation. It's the one example that I can bring up. There were times when I was either working or living in situations where I was obviously suddenly separated out, but I knew it and I could confront it. And this one, I was set apart in a deliberate kind of way that was new for me.

WILMOT: Were there any men who worked in your office?

SOSKIN: I don't remember men in the office at all.

WILMOT: Was Marguerite's husband there?

SOSKIN: In and out. He was certainly involved, but I don't remember anyone else 00:26:00working there.

WILMOT: Did you know someone named Cleophis Brown?

SOSKIN: That name is familiar. But there was a very distinct difference between men's work and women's work, I think. We wouldn't necessarily have done very much involving even Roland Rolles or Cleophis Brown or--I remember his name, I don't remember him at all. The name is familiar to me.

WILMOT: I'm wondering and I'm confused about this--did you work with Reverend 00:27:00William B. Smith?

SOSKIN: He would have been a Willie Smith I would think. That's such an ordinary name. I don't remember.

WILMOT: I'm wondering if you have a memory of a Marin ship strike in 1943, when there was national boycott of the auxiliaries, where members refused to pay their dues?

SOSKIN: No.

WILMOT: That may have been after.

SOSKIN: No, I don't at all.

WILMOT: Okay.

SOSKIN: I don't know whether that's because I simply wasn't awake enough or whether--I just don't remember. Does she say where that building was?

WILMOT: I'll find out. We can spend time looking at this if you want to and find out where it was.

SOSKIN: Because that was my only experience with Richmond up to moving back here.

WILMOT: Did you and Marguerite and Zola and the last person who's name I keep forgetting--?

SOSKIN: Zola, Marguerite and Martha.

WILMOT: Martha. Did you go out after work?

SOSKIN: Occasionally, we saw each other at events from time to time, but we were all young marrieds and we would go home. That was our work day. We didn't socialize that much.

WILMOT: And the building as you said was located--where was it located?

SOSKIN: I can't place it. I'm sure it must have been torn down. If it was any place still remaining, I'm sure I'd know it.

WILMOT: Do you know the general area where it was?

SOSKIN: Uh-uh.

WILMOT: Wow. How did you get to work?

SOSKIN: I cannot it remember, except we must have carpooled. If we had gone on public transportation I'd know it. Because I don't ever remember here by bus.

WILMOT: How long did you think you worked there?

SOSKIN: Certainly maybe a year, I don't think it was much more than that. What would I have done after that? No, I guess that was prior to opening our own business, because that's when we weren't going to work for anyone after that. It was out of that that we started our shop.

WILMOT: When you say that, what do you mean? "It was out of that that you started your shop."

SOSKIN: That we realized that were was a huge market in race music, or at that time what it was known as and that there was no outlet for it, and that suddenly there was this huge market that was created by this influx of people from the South and that we could do that. And so we did it.

WILMOT: Prior to opening up the race music store, your husband was working in 00:30:00the shipyards as a chipper, is that the right word?

SOSKIN: Yeah.

WILMOT: What did that mean?

SOSKIN: I haven't a clue. I would think it would be taking old paint off. But why would they be taking old paint off new construction? I don't know what a chipper is.

WILMOT: What do you know of his experiences in the shipyards? What did he tell you about his work?

SOSKIN: He was working with--a group of men that Mel knew were all working together. So all I knew was that Mel and Johnny Allen, and {Bo Lewis?}--and these were all guys that had graduated from Berkeley High with Mel and had all remained in the area--all were working on the same ship at the same time. They would talk about maybe what would have happened during the day that was funny or not funny, but they talked very little--there wasn't any political words that I can remember them ringing back. It was just a place they went on their shift. They didn't bring much of that home.

WILMOT: Was your husband part of the auxiliary?

SOSKIN: I don't remember that he was but he must have been. I don't remember--as I remember coming across my brother-in-law's cards at the Civil Service Commission, I don't remember coming across Mel's cards. But then he must have been because he would not have been in the white union. Though Mel was lighter skinned than I was, I don't remember a time in his life when he ever passed, at all. He was very who he was. So he would have had to be in that union.

WILMOT: If he was in a union then, he would have had to been part of the auxiliary.

SOSKIN: I don't think he could have worked if he weren't in the union. I think it was a strictly a union operation.

WILMOT: Can you tell me again what was the experience for him that brought him 00:32:00to the place where he knew he needed to be his own boss?

SOSKIN: I think he'd always wanted to be--he was entrepreneurial. He didn't have a lot of ability but he wanted to do his own thing. His father's inability to get above a dockworker's job all those years and then Mel's inability to get into the union to be bakery wagon driver, which he wanted to be above all things, because he was not white, left him very little choice. He wanted to go into business and I think when he became really avid about it was one of the things--the little duplex that we bought when we got married-- that Mel bought 00:33:00when got married for us was owned by a man named Aldo Russo who was an Italian jukebox--he had a jukebox route. He serviced it. He was very fond of Mel. He got Mel to help him service the boxes. He would pay him to go around and change the records in these boxes, which is how Mel discovered that whole industry. When Mel found how hard it was to find the music to put into black clubs and restaurants, all the little sandwich shops, there was no way to get them. Mr. Russo helped Mel to begin to get those things. That was the way he started off. That was the door that opened up the whole idea of putting together a shop of his own.

We opened up in the garage of our little duplex with orange crates and cigar box for money. I think Rick was--that's when we adopted him. Rick was born in March, we opened the store in June of the same year. So I had a bassinet and little playpen down near the cash register. I sold records through a window cut into a garage wall, while Mel was at the shipyards and doing his other things. We got radio time, that's what it was and we began to play records on KRE and people would line up in front of that little place to buy records.

WILMOT: What was KRE?

SOSKIN: KRE was--originally there is still a little building at the foot of 00:35:00Ashby Avenue that's sits there in that marsh, just before you hit the freeway. There was a little building there and it was radio station KRE and there was some pretty hip disc jockeys there. There were no black jocks at all. But they were excited by the music and they use to play it. We put on the first spot we had, I think, was {Wyonnie Harris?} doing "Around the Clock," [giggling] which was really risqu for us at that time, it was really over the edge.

WILMOT: What was the implication?

SOSKIN: It was called "Around the Clock" and it was really innuendo, sexual innuendo. People would literally come down and they couldn't even find the place because it was so tiny in this garage but they would circle the block until they found it, trying to buy this record.

WILMOT: So this record was about--

SOSKIN: It was Wyonnie Harris who was a blues singer. And "Around the Clock" was 00:36:00the first record. And that's when we found out how big black music really was.

WILMOT: Who were your first customers?

SOSKIN: The black community. And a certain number of whites who were logging into the black blues at that time. We became very, very well known at that time. We weren't into gospel at all. Eventually we became only a gospel store but up 'til then it was all blues and R&B.

WILMOT: When you say the black community, would you characterize this as the older community that had been--more native born?

SOSKIN: No, this was an entirely new community for us. I don't think I ever went 00:37:00home again after that. I think the world that I interacted with was not that original clearly confined social group. I was out of that. There were still events that we attended because we did, but my everyday non-white world was now a different one.

WILMOT: Do you remember any of the other songs or records that sold really well?

SOSKIN: Oh, yes! Anything by Lou Rawls and anything by--that early on, who would it be? It was mostly R&B and some blues but not-- the traditional blues came later, there was Light and Hopkins and--? Oh, who would it be? Always Billie 00:38:00Holiday, we got to see her when she was in town. Jimmy Lundsford and Duke Ellington, that kind of jazz was really big. Erskine Hawkins. Who else?

WILMOT: Because you were one of the only distributors in the area of this kind of music, did you have a sense of what venues your records were being played in?

SOSKIN: Say more about that. I'm not sure what you want.

WILMOT: Did you have a network with the entertainment venues because you were 00:39:00the distributors of these records, so did club owners come to you to buy the records, or deejays?

SOSKIN: Mostly individuals. The day came when people wanted to connect with us. I remember the day that I was in the shop alone and Jimmy Lyons, who was the big guy out of Chicago, or wherever he was from, who later settled in Monterey and established the grandfather of jazz festivals at Monterey, he had a show sort of midnight 'til two, three in the morning and he would contact us for records. At one point, he came over because he wanted to advertise us on his show and it was too threatening to Mel. Mel couldn't connect, he didn't wanted any part of it, which I always regretted. Because I used to listen to Jimmy Lyons at night and just loved his taste and loved his music. So that Mel was really protecting his 00:40:00individuality and his own thing from the beginning. He didn't connect easily with anyone. He grew to be a very, very important promoter.

WILMOT: Your husband did or Jimmy Lyons?

SOSKIN: No, both, but not nearly as Jimmy Lyons was. Jimmy Lyons was huge.

WILMOT: What was your job and what was your role at the race music store? What was your job?

SOSKIN: I was sort of everything in the beginning, because Mel had two other jobs. I was behind the counter, so I did it all. I organized the stock and did the ordering and did everything in the beginning until we built a home in Walnut Creek and I was divorced from the shop completely. Mel became that, and that was 00:41:00all he was at that point.

WILMOT: What were your favorite songs and artists?

SOSKIN: Oh God! I was certainly a Duke Ellington fan, totally for years and years, still am. I loved Sarah Vaughn, but that was in her beginning way, way back. I loved Billie Holiday, but not as much in the beginning as later. I could not relate to traditional black blues for a long, long time. I was a jazz buff always. I would move along with jazz as jazz developed and changed and could go with it, that wasn't true for me with blues. I, later, much later, when I came 00:42:00back into the business, recognized and appreciated black gospel as jazz come home, contemporary black gospel. The day came when I knew that the best jazz was coming out of the choir loft. This was something that I can fully appreciate.

WILMOT: I'm wondering how that--because I know you also as a singer and song writer, so I'm wondering how that influenced your own work?

SOSKIN: That's a secret life. In looking back, I know how much I 00:43:00compartmentalized. I didn't do any writing and composing until I was--I guess my daughter was two or three years old and that was my fourth child. And that came out of a break down--that came out of really getting needful to the place where I was able to emerge as a way of salvation. Then there's a part of me, that part of me is only known by the people that I interacted with in the Mount Diablo community. My world, that traditional world that I grew up in doesn't know me as a writer/singer at all. And the people that I came back to when I came back to 00:44:00Berkeley don't know me as that person at all. But during those years and you have to realize I was there from the early fifties until the seventies.

WILMOT: In Lafayette?

SOSKIN: In Walnut Creek.

WILMOT: In Walnut Creek.

SOSKIN: But during those years, I had done concerts at a number of colleges. I was always a little bit not quite admitting that I was doing this. I was Betty Reid, who was willing to sing for you, but I didn't want to be known as a singer. It's amazing, because I did a lot of that. Mostly writing was a way of 00:45:00getting outside of me where I can see things are happening inside of me. It was very private, very personal. And when I go back and listen to the music now, it feels like important music. At the time, I didn't have that feeling at all and I tucked it away after I came back into Berkeley.

WILMOT: You didn't feel like even as this is a secret life and something that felt very private musically, where did you feel influences from?

SOSKIN: I'm not sure I know. Except that it was more jazz than anything but probably art songs. I don't know. I remember once there's this woman that was a 00:46:00friend that I worked for a short time in Walnut Creek who had a dress shop, an exclusive little dress shop. And when I was trying to work my way out of my marriage, I took a job working with Jean. Her husband had been one of Billie Holiday's managers, been in New York before they ever came out to California. Musicians that came to the area stayed at Jean's place in Walnut Creek and Dizzy was a very close friend of Jean's. I remember Dizzy would never fly, he always traveled by train and he was afraid to death of flying. I would go with Jean down to the railroad station and pick up Dizzy and bring him back. And she knew about my music and a couple times she had me come over and sing for him and he 00:47:00said, "You don't sound like nobody, lady!" So I don't know what that meant except that I came away with the feeling that whatever influences were there were not very marked.

WILMOT: You had your own sound.

SOSKIN: Yeah. I was doing whatever was coming clearly from myself. I always valued that.

WILMOT: Was Jean African American?

SOSKIN: No, she's Jewish.

WILMOT: She was Jewish.

SOSKIN: Much darker skin than I. People took us for sisters, but she was Jewish.

WILMOT: Just to return to that race music store, did you have the sense where were your customers from? Were they from the immediate city or from all over?

SOSKIN: No, they were from all over. I walk down the street 'til this day, and people approach me on the street in Richmond and say, "Aren't you Betty Reid?" that were customers even back when. Isiah Turner, the present city manager of Richmond remembers coming into my store as a kid. So you know it's been there now for an awful lot of years.

WILMOT: Did you have any competition? Were there any other--?

SOSKIN: Eventually, there were a couple. One opened up on 7th Street in Oakland and another one opened up on Alcatraz, other black shops. They weren't quite competition, because we got a head start pretty much on the most of them. But in time, they all became kind of equal, I think. We eventually had three stores, one in Oakland, downtown Oakland and one in Vallejo, small shops.

WILMOT: I didn't know that. I thought you had only one store. When did you open these other stores?

SOSKIN: No. We had one in Swann's Market, which was the big 10th Street market downtown. Yeah, we had one there for years and years. I was not involved in any of those, that was pretty much after I was raising kids and Mel was doing that stuff. Mel and his Uncle Paul. Paul Reid who was Mel's father's brother had been a really fine salesman with the Golden State Insurance, which was a black insurance company. He left there and joined Mel in the business and that's when things really took off because he had a lot of know-how. And he was the public 00:50:00part of Reid's. I have some pictures around here with Paul. He emceed concerts; they gave huge concerts, choir competitions throughout the Bay Area. They filled the Oakland Auditorium, absolutely filled it. But this was Paul who just fabulous. And he died eventually.

WILMOT: When did this store shift or expand its inventory to include gospel music?

SOSKIN: That was pretty much under Mel and Paul. Paul was a churchman. He was the person that sort of brought that out. I'm pretty sure that's true. They introduced Aretha's father into the area, for instance. They brought in performers from all over the country who were black performers or black gospel performers. James Cleveland out of Los Angeles came for concerts, Shirley Caesar 00:51:00and all of the quartets, they were all brought in for concerts, huge concerts.

WILMOT: Shirley Caesar?

SOSKIN: Shirley Caesar and the Blind Boys and all those people. They were the big gospel stars of the time. White America was not paying attention to black gospel music then. So we had a corner on that. R&B and blues was finding its way into the mainstream where it was twisted by the Elvis Presleys of the day. But black gospel was not seen as a market then. We had it pretty much to ourselves for a long time. At least Paul and Mel did.

WILMOT: Did your market ever extend pass the Bay Area region?

SOSKIN: Oh yes! The thing that I did before we left was to establish a 00:52:00newsletter, which eventually got be twenty thousand people, and I would write it and process the whole thing and stamp it and send it out third class mail. And eventually it got to be so expensive that we couldn't afford it anymore and we simply had to stop sending it out. But I was so political in the letters that I told people how to vote, [laughing] I would tell people all kinds of stuff. Because that became my voice and they let me have it. So that was great. I did this newsletter. So we have people literally to this day drive in from Sacramento, from Monterey. We have a customer who comes in from Reno. We did lots of mail order. We had lots of servicemen during the Gulf War, a lot of kids 00:53:00that were on ships that would send for stuff. We eventually began to get e-mail orders, which we still do. So, yeah, it broke out of its locale completely.

WILMOT: During this time, is there anything else that you want to tell me about the race music store, I'd love to hear it. So just because I hadn't posed a question, feel free to tell me more.

SOSKIN: That music store had as many lives as I did, in a lot of ways. It started off as a little R&B, jazz kind of spot that grew way passed its potential and did very well. Then it went through a period of being a growing gospel shop. And then it found its level with the street. All that time the 00:54:00street was going down. Sacramento Street eventually became sort of the sin capital of the city of Berkeley.

The year that I came back after Mel's health failed--this in the seventies I guess, it was in '76 and '77--the street was lined with drug dealers. Inside the store, when I went in to close it down because Mel's had failed, there was a room that was nothing but posters, you know those velvet kind of posters that you light up with blue light or something, there were water pipes in the counters, you know obviously it had become to some extent a head shop. It had become what the street was. I didn't know what to do with it when I first came back, because it to some extent was scary to me. It still had a clientele of 00:55:00church people, but its clientele had changed. Not long after I took it over, Leopold's opened just outside of Cal and Cal had the discount houses up there, and there's no way--those places were selling for less than my wholesale prices. There was no way I could compete with discount houses, so I cut out everything but gospel, because they hadn't discovered it yet.

Now the store was mine, but it was also true that I was working for the University of California--that's when I was married to Bill--and I knew that there's no way to make a financial success out of that store.

I had become so political by now, because the sixties had been by and I found a role in the Black Revolution, I was a different person than I was when I had been there before. So that I decided to keep the shop and use it towards social change. If there was some way that I could amplify my voice by being a black merchant from Sacramento Street when I went to City Hall, I could do things that as a middle class woman from up on Grizzly Peak, you know, as a part of the university, I could go down, I couldn't get very much to happen. But the people that I knew in my life as Mrs. William Soskin were the movers and shakers of the city of Berkeley. So if I could marry those, if I could go down and be Betty Reid on Sacramento Street, but could use the contacts that my husband and I had as Betty Soskin at City Hall, then I might be able to make some changes. So I 00:57:00very clearly and deliberately kept that business open with the idea being that if it only paid its way, but magnified my voice, that it didn't have to do anything more than that. If it paid its own expenses and paid a couple of salaries for someone to work for me. So that's when I took over the business to do a whole different thing. And that part of it--the shop had another life that was almost not related to its first life.

WILMOT: Did you own the building that the shop was housed in?

SOSKIN: Yes, but it was in foreclosure. We had owned, but Mel hadn't paid income taxes for three years. He hadn't paid our mortgage forever. He had begun to gamble heavily. So that when Paul had died by now so that the supports that he 00:58:00had were gone. I was gone. Paul was gone. Paul died of tuberculosis or some sort of complications at a fairly young age, I guess he was in his early fifties. Mel couldn't pull it off; he couldn't maintain by himself. And it failed. Everything went out from under him. And his health failed. He developed diabetes, which I think was to some extent very stress related.

But by now, I had been married for some time to someone else. We are still parents of kids and we were friends, because we started off as friends as teenagers. And the relationship reverted back to friendship. So that I was still that person that was friends with him, though I didn't know what things were. But when I went down and found how bad it was--called the mortgage company and 00:59:00asked them for an extension, called the distributors and said it looked that there's a life there and if they give me six months, maybe I could pull it out, and got cooperation from everybody, and was able to do that.

But the place was redlined; I couldn't get any insurance on the building. There were things that were impossible to deal with. I learned how to deal with them. I learned how to cope. I was told that there was no way that they could do anything for me, no second mortgages, no loans, no nothing. But if I could pick up the building and move it six blocks in either direction, they could help me. Because where it was sitting, there was nobody can help me.

WILMOT: And you did?

SOSKIN: No. So then I changed the community that it was sitting in. I literally 01:00:00changed the climate of the community. Across the street from us on Sacramento Street, between 67th and Ashby now, is what's called the Byron Runford Plaza. That was me. That was known as Betty's house to my kids.

I got myself on as an aide to one of the councilmen who happened to be my attorney. I worked with him two terms of office. This was Don Jelnick, who's still around. And that put me in City Hall. Gus Newport was then mayor of Berkeley. I had worked to support Gus. I was appointed to a task force that was assigned to find scattered site housing throughout the city for something like 01:01:00fifty low-income homes. At the time, I tried to get the city to take over the lots across the street from me as one of the sites and the city wouldn't do it.

But what they did do was to eventually take it on as a separate project. And I was able to convince them that it was cancerous to the rest of the community. If we would change that, all the property in the area would become more valuable. They put, I think it was eight and half a million dollars into that, tore down I think it was crack houses. Most of the people in the area were squatters, a lot of them, in those houses, so by the time they cleaned it all up, and bought it all up, built forty nine units of new housing, the face of the community was changed. Now my building was the only blight. [laughing] That's not quite true, but it's a whole different place.

WILMOT: Hold on one second, I think this is going to end and I want to stop it and rewind it.

SOSKIN: But that was wonderful.

WILMOT: Yeah. Hold on one second.

[interview interruption while video tape is changed]

I was wondering when the store moved out of your duplex garage into its own building?

SOSKIN: That happened in 1964. I was living in Walnut Creek pretty much. At that time, Mel would leave--we had built a home out there, and once the construction was completed and Mel went back full time to working on the shop and I was pregnant with David actually at that period. The building went up in 1964. We had actually paid 750 dollars now for that lot, I remember.

WILMOT: Is this the one on Sacramento?

SOSKIN: Yes. Mr. {Mossou?}. Aldo owned both the site that we bought, the duplex, and he owned the lot on the corner. And he was very fond of us and wanted us to own that extra piece of property and we did and Mel bought it. I remember it was 750 dollars.

WILMOT: Down payment?

SOSKIN: No! That was the cost. The cost of the duplex was $4900 dollars. And I'm not saying down payment, I'm saying the cost of it. That's what property was at the time.

WILMOT: So why was that other parcel only $750?

SOSKIN: I have no idea, but what's I paid for it. We held it until--Mel had always planned at some point to put a building there, so in 1964 when we were living in Walnut Creek, that building was constructed. I was living a very separate life and he was working twelve hours a day pretty much, seven days a 01:04:00week. I mean he spent all of his time in Berkeley and I spent all my time in Walnut Creek raising kids. We grew apart pretty much. But I knew little about that building.

WILMOT: You mentioned that during this time after the first three years of your marriage, you had four children, and could you talk their names and the sequence that they were born?

SOSKIN: The first child was adopted. At the age nine days. And that was Dale Richard Reid, who was our eldest. When he was five, I finally got pregnant with 01:05:00Bobby. Bob was born in 1950, must have been, yeah, because Rick was born 1945. Rick was our first, Bob was our first, David was our youngest son and Dori was our only daughter. So they were all quite special to me. I actually loved mothering, I mean I got a kick out of being a parent. But it coincided with our moving out of the area. Rick was a very bright little boy, and when we moved into Walnut Creek, he had been the top of his class in the third grade. When we went out to Walnut Creek, he was behind the other children in the same grade, which was when I got a good picture of the difference in education in the inner city and outside of it.

Once we had Bobby--and you said you were asking me about being pregnant--I didn't believe it until I was about four months pregnant. I remember waiting because I was very small physically, I was just a little person. I don't think I weighed a hundred pounds until I was fifty. So I was slender, proportionate but very small. I had expected to show very quickly when I was pregnant, but I remember walking down the street in downtown Oakland one day, catching sight of myself in a display window and I was wearing a green knit suit, and for the first time, saw my body shape had changed. And realized, for the first time, that this was pregnancy, because the doctor kept telling me I was pregnant but I 01:07:00didn't believe it because I couldn't see it. I must've been about three and half months at that time and could see that I was not poking up but straight up and down where even though I was very small I was curved where I was straight and that baby was here. It was a thrilling experience to be pregnant. That was marvelous. Even though it was not easy, because I had a five-year-old at the time, but it was wonderful thing.

WILMOT: So you got pregnant eight years into your marriage?

SOSKIN: Yeah. Then once it got started, when Bob was a year old, I was waiting to have the next one. I wanted to get pregnant right away.

WILMOT: What year was Bob born?

SOSKIN: In 1950. Two and half years later, I guess, David was born. Bob's birth 01:08:00was difficult, I was in labor for about thirty-six hours before he actually was born, but he was fine. David's birth--

WILMOT: Did they allow your husband to come into the labor room?

SOSKIN: No. Now see, I don't know. Mel's working pattern was such that I don't know whether he just wasn't there because he was busy and because I was into understanding, always--I mean I was very understanding, with low expectations for his participation. He was really preoccupied with the business. But I don't 01:09:00remember his being with me at all during that. And I was given drugs so that I was not aware when Bob actually born.

WILMOT: Which hospital were you at?

SOSKIN: At Alta Bates. David was born at Kaiser and he was a larger baby. There were complications after he was born. I had an infection in a breast and was very, very ill for a long. So that was not good. Then I had two small children. In fact, the house was being built while I was pregnant with David. So I was pregnant with a house and pregnant with two little kids and pregnant with a new baby. So David actually should have been named as being born in Walnut Creek, because that's where we were living though we came into town to have this child.

I became pregnant with Dori when David was what--about four and I wanted another child. I wanted a girl. There was amniocentesis at the time, so I could not know that this was a child, so there was a great delight when she was born. But I went to a black doctor; I didn't want to go back to Kaiser, where David was born, because that had been not a good experience. But this man turned out to be completely inept. Even though he was in the room, she was born in the bed, we did never get into a delivery room. I didn't know--she was born one month premature. I've gone into labor prematurely, had gone in after hemorrhaging. She 01:11:00was born. I didn't realize she was brain damaged, didn't know until she was a year old before I realized that she wasn't developing as the other kids had developed. She had suffered anoxia at birth, which was the loss of some brain cells from oxygen starvation in the process of birth. That was not easy; that was hard. Because on the one hand, she was our first girl, and she was my only girl, and I waited and wanted her desperately. And to have it dawn on me slowly that she had born handicapped was really hard, which was the reason I fell apart when she was about two and half or three.

WILMOT: Was Dori her full name?

SOSKIN: Dorian Reid.

WILMOT: Why did you name your children how you named them? Or were you the sole namer?

SOSKIN: I don't really know. Bob was named after one of Mel's uncles, Bob Reid. Allen's his middle name, which is my mother's maiden name. David was named after one of Mel's friends actually. I often wished I'd gone back and use some of the names in my family, my father's Dorson Charbonnet, which was not a name that was--it was the only Dorson I knew. I'd like to use that name, but didn't. Dorian was named--I'm not even sure--her middle name was Leon, which was my middle name. But I think I just loved the name Dorian.

WILMOT: What year was Dorian born?

SOSKIN: She was born in 1957. Yeah.

WILMOT: David was born what year?

SOSKIN: Well, Rick was 1945. Bobby was 1950. David would've been 1952. Dori would've been '57.

WILMOT: It was in 1952 that you moved out to Walnut Creek? How did you locate 01:14:00that lot and decide to move there? I understand you built on the lot. How did the buying process go for you?

SOSKIN: Because we would visit Mel's family. His parents lived in Danville, and driving home through what was an area called Saranap, which was an unincorporated area, Mel apparently saw that lot at one point and decided he wanted it. It was about what was over a half-acre. It was bordered by a creek. It had an old swimming pool in the middle of it. It was sort of in a {swill?}. No, there was nothing on the property.

WILMOT: Just a swimming pool but no house?

SOSKIN: No, but it must've belong to a house that had once been there. He decided that he wanted that, but there was no way we could buy it, because we weren't white. We both felt that there was going to be easier to buy that, because it was on an unincorporated area than if it were within the city limits. But even that we couldn't do, so we got someone to buy it for us. That was the white wife of who was judge at the time but later Mayor Lionel Wilson of Oakland. His wife Dorothy made the purchase for us.

It was eventful. [chuckle] It triggered a lot of anger. The architect that signed our place was threatened, as we were. We got letters telling us and 01:16:00asking us--one letter, which was really surprising--I wished I had saved it--asking if we realized--the rumor had gotten out that Father Divine, who at the time was the great spiritual leader of Fundamentalist Movement across the country, had purchased it to put in what was called the Heaven and they had gotten the feeling because that this pool was there that this is what that was going to be. So a lot of the anger, a lot of it was fueled by the rumor and no one was bothering to listen to the fact that we were just young couple with a couple of small kids. You know, I was pregnant.

WILMOT: They thought a whole community was moving in?

SOSKIN: So then even when they found that out, they realized that we were a couple and that we were kids. They would see us coming down--you know, I would 01:17:00come down just before the sun would set at night sometimes to see the progress of the building once it was under construction. But even before that, when they stack the lumber, we got word that if we tried to stack lumber there that they would burn it. Yeah. The neighbors were very upset about our coming in.

WILMOT: So did they ever make good on any of those threats?

SOSKIN: No. The thing that was interesting to me was that over the period of time, it must've taken six months to actually construct that home--my father was overseeing the construction and Mel was working on the job and they'd hired laborers and other carpenters--but while the house was under construction, sometimes I'd be there just sitting on the property watching what was going on. Over time, people would walk down to where I was and would tell me what their 01:18:00names were, tell me that they hoped that I would be happy there and I learned that almost every one of them had done it without knowing that the others had. So that over time, I realized that what they could do collectively, none of them was willing to do alone, that the Improvement Association was a taking a stand against us being there, but individually the people in the community were probably not in tune with that. Because almost everybody had said to me, "I hope that you are happy here." It was a very strange kind of thing.

There was a Robert {Conden?} who was an attorney, a very high political guy, who lived right around the bend from our property, who offered to give a dinner party to have the neighbors come in and meet us. I remember saying, "No! You 01:19:00won't do that, because it's my constitutional right to be here and I won't have you giving me permission. I don't need this." I thought maybe I hurt his feelings but that's when I was becoming politically aware and standing up for myself. I was doing it pretty much by myself because Mel was in town working.

But Rick, I still have chills when I think about him, because he was the first black child at the grammar school. He entered at the third or fourth grade and was taking all this stuff. We put him in school before we moved into Walnut Creek. Because while the house was under construction, I was going out there every day and I would take him and he would get on the school bus. Then he was catching all this stuff at school that I wasn't really aware of. Finally after 01:20:00we had actually moved into the house, the principal called me in one day and said that he thought that I should not have this child in school, because we weren't residents of the district. That's when I realized that they didn't realize that we were actually in the house.

But it was only a matter of few months when somebody in the community came and told me that the school was doing a minstrel show as their big fundraiser. We were the only black family in the community and here was my kid, the only black kid in the school, and they were doing a minstrel show! I drove my little station wagon up to the school, and we were walked in the principal's office and his {endman?} costume or interlocutor whatever he was, was hanging on his door for that evening's performance.

WILMOT: It was that night.

SOSKIN: It was that night. I went in and I said, "You can't do this." His face was flushed and he said, "What do you mean? I know that now, but I didn't know that before." And I said, "Well, why do you know it now?" He said, "I didn't know it until I saw your face." He said, "You need to realize--" No, he said, "It's not anything insulting, what we are doing is we are showing black people or colored people as happy-go-lucky and--" And I said, "Do I look happy-go-lucky to you?" I said, "You know this was always meant as ridicule of black people. The form is a ridicule of black people, this is not something that you can do." That night I sat in the front row of their minstrel show. [whispers] I was 01:22:00terrified. I was terrified. And now I realize what my kid was going through.

WILMOT: Was your son part of the minstrel show?

SOSKIN: No. He hadn't even mentioned it. I don't think he'd have known what a minstrel show was. But I was also by that time involved with the Unitarian group that was pretty sophisticated, and they knew. It was one of these people that told me that the show was being held. But I had dropped my kid in the middle of this, which was just--oh! And it was about then too while I was new in the community, just before I met any liberals really, real liberals, I picked up the 01:23:00local newspaper and saw where a couple had moved into a housing shack out in Pleasant Hill, a black couple, a truck driver and his young wife. The Improvement Association was coming together to throw them out and make a lot of noise. By that time, my problem had been solved pretty much. I mean I was there and I was in my house. The neighbors had backed off and everything was fine. [phone rings]

WILMOT: Do you want to answer that?

SOSKIN: Yeah. It might be Dori. I can't afford to ever not answer phones--

[interview interruption]

SOSKIN: I was talking about the young couple. There was this young couple who were buying a house in Pleasant Hill. And because my problems had worked out, I decided that I would go and tell the people that it was okay. I was that naive. "Just don't pay any attention to this." In the newspaper account, there was the 01:24:00address of the school where their Improvement Association was going to be meeting, so I got in my car and I put on my finest little suede jacket and my gabardine skirt and I'm looking sharp and I know it.

I drove out to this school and I walk in and sit down in the middle of the room. And I had assumed that if I were there that my presence would protect me--that being there as an African American, that there are things that they would say among themselves that they wouldn't say in my presence. So I'd never really heard what people say at those meetings.

But they didn't recognize me as African American.

So I sat in the middle of their meeting and the room was full and I heard things that I had never heard before, such as, "If all else fails, we can get them on 01:25:00out the basis of the diseases they bring into our community." I sat here and listened to this. They talked about awful things about black people moving into the communities, what was going to happen to their property values. So, I got up in the middle of one of the speeches and I walked up to the front. And I said, "I really feel that you need to know that I'm here, because I want to tell you that I am colored and I moved into this community two years ago or whatever that was and all these things that you are fearing are simply not true." I just took them on, one thing and another. They were also of liberals there who had come to see, as I had, what these people were going to do. There were people in the community who were not bigots at all. So when I stood up to speak, I didn't realize they were there, but I had my little say and then I got up and walked out.

As I walked out of the meeting, they got up and followed me out. And then I heard other footsteps behind me and other people walked out. The thing that was so interesting is that a newspaperman came out and I was getting ready to get in my car and he wanted to know who I was and we talked. He said, "I've got go back in, because I've got to see what happened behind your appearance." So he went in. And I had seen a guy I've been in high school with at Castlemont in the audience. This guy, after I walked out, had stood up before the people who were left and said that he knew me--apparently, I think he drove a milk truck--and that I was one of the kinds of people that was trained by the communist to do this kind of work. I had no political affiliations at all. And this guy that I 01:27:00had thought was my friend, he was my schoolmate from Castlemont from years before, turned out to be one of the spokesmen in their group. But what that did was it identified me to the liberal progressive element in the community who also turned out to be mostly Unitarians. So that I suddenly was in a community of people, though they were white, who politically I could identify with. And that took a couple of years to get to that place. But we worked then on all kinds of things from then on.

WILMOT: I want to ask you about you about that community, the Unitarian liberal white community, but I want to first go back to two important things that came to me from what you just said. The first thing is my understanding of white 01:28:00flight, though in my mind it happens a little later, not in the 1950's.

SOSKIN: Uh-uh., no, it happened before.

WILMOT: I'm wondering about that. Had you moved into a community of white people who had just moved out of Oakland and Berkeley to get away from black people?

SOSKIN: No! One would've thought that, but in the area where I was were a lot of people who lived in that unincorporated area for a long time. There were large houses, there were small houses Because it was unincorporated there was some really--there was a family who lived in what had been a converted chicken coop that were white. There was a psychiatrist and his wife who lived about a half a block down the road from where we were. It was a very mixed community, very 01:29:00mixed, this was not a housing tract. Now, what was true with the other family in Pleasant Hill was that this was one of those communities where all the houses were just alike, it was a housing tract, and being different would have stood out. But not where we were. Where we were, I would have thought we would have the best chance. There was an artist and his wife who lived in the next house where we were. I later took painting lessons from {Edie Dinken?}. I mean, this was a very, very eclectic group of people.

WILMOT: In the housing tract that you went to go in and kind of advocate for the young black couple who you felt a kinship with, was that a community that was kind of a repository for white flight?

SOSKIN: Oh, yes! I think that would have been.

WILMOT: I mean, especially if they had that one person from your high school from East Oakland.

SOSKIN: Yeah. And they'd be homogenous, I mean these were people of a particular 01:30:00income. I mean, this was housing tract. This is not what I would've bought into for that very reason. I mean, I would've wanted to be in exactly where I was, which was a place where there was a lot of diversity, not in race but in everything else.

WILMOT: That's really interesting to me because when I think about your move, and the subsequent years after your move, and I put it in conversation with that same white flight movement that happened at that same time, it just kind of heightens for me the tensions that you may have faced.

SOSKIN: Oh sure, sure. But see California was undergoing such, you know--talk about earthquakes, the the human quakes that were going on in every way, the 01:31:00change from 1942 or 1941, in the beginning of the war and the sixties, that twenty years, this state's population was--how many times did it turn over? I mean it was, we were, lik, living in four different states without ever living home, because the rate of change was so great and the change in our own lives were so great.

WILMOT: From Walnut Creek, did you keep a finger on the pulse in your old neighborhood, in East Oakland?

SOSKIN: No. I became very much a part of Walnut Creek, very much.

WILMOT: Did you have a sense though that East Oakland was changing where you lived?

SOSKIN: Oh yes! My parents were still there. It was becoming more and more, very, very rapidly--this is where the realtors in the area dropped the string around the area where black folks could be. And they were putting everybody in the same areas. My parents, the entire neighborhood became black, I mean totally for blocks and blocks and blocks.

WILMOT: Around when?

SOSKIN: Early on, because there were already a number of family on 83rd Avenue. There were a couple of families on 87th. There was at least one family on 82nd. It was several families on 79th. This was an area where blacks had already began to move into, of the old people. So that, this was an area where people were more fed into. So, yeah. My parents became the heart of eventually--I couldn't even give their house away. I tried to sell it, and we had one buyer. The area had become so rough that was no way to--it was incredible.

WILMOT: What year was that?

SOSKIN: I sold their house in '88, '89?

WILMOT: It's funny because now that neighborhood is gentrifying.

SOSKIN: Is it?

WILMOT: Yeah, but mostly up by MacArthur.

SOSKIN: Oh, up that way. So we would below East 14th.

WILMOT: 83rd and MacArthur, the houses in the past six months there had increased value by about 30 percent.

SOSKIN: That's amazing.

WILMOT: Because all over Oakland, it's all these little craftsman bungalows, and so people are locating that as--it's one of last affordable areas. It's very interesting.

SOSKIN: The great first homes, sure! It's great for first home. Where are those people going that are going out of those homes?

WILMOT: I am not certain and I'm not sure--I think a lot of them are actually renter occupied, but a lot of them are also owner occupied. There was a strong tradition of home ownership in that area. It's very prevalent.

SOSKIN: I know that Fruitvale is largely Hispanic, but is that growing down further and further east?

WILMOT: I think that area is becoming kind of around East Mountain Mall. I would 01:34:00say that Fruitvale area has extended to East Mountain mall. So that area is like--.

SOSKIN: That's amazing! See that was largely Portuguese and Irish.

WILMOT: It's not entirely--I would say it's forty-sixty or forty-forty-twenty. Forty Mexican, forty black, and twenty percent Arab and Asian.

SOSKIN: Interesting. That's an interesting mix.

WILMOT: You said that community used to be largely Portuguese and Irish?

SOSKIN: Oh yeah! And over the years, there were number of African American families, but they all knew each other.

WILMOT: That's interesting, so you watched that neighborhood really become--and 01:35:00you associate that with the real estate agents actively kind of moving black people into that area?

SOSKIN: Oh yeah! Oh sure. I say that because we couldn't get a bank loan to buy outside what was prescribed black district in Berkeley. We could not buy property above Grove Street, which is why we wound up in--if we are going have to fight, we might as well fight for something we want. So we went all way to Walnut Creek. But even though we were a business, doing business with the Bank of America, in Berkeley, they wouldn't handle a loan for us.

WILMOT: When you are ready to move into your second home, and your family was expanding. Were there areas that you were particularly excited and interested in?

SOSKIN: No, Mel wanted to be like his father actually. And we knew where we were not supposed to be but we wanted to be out in the rural area and I loved it. I 01:36:00really did. It was really nice when we got over the shock of the first two years. It was a rich experience for all of us.

WILMOT: After Rick, did you send your other children to those public schools?

SOSKIN: They all went to those public schools until they got to high school and then I couldn't get anybody through the high school. Rick failed, he simply stopped going, it got to be just excruciating in his last year, so he wound up getting his picture taken and all that stuff and refused to graduate. Bobby was also very bright and doing very well, except he would not bend. Rick took it all; he didn't even bring it home particularly. He absorbed it. And he was fighting being gay, being black in a white community. He had so much stuff to 01:37:00deal with, being adopted and the only child. [interview interruption when phone rings]

Rick, not only was he a black child in a white environment, totally, he was gay and by this time actively gay, he was the only adopted child--later I had three 01:38:00children. All these things were difficult that I don't think he ever really got over being separate and apart, and always a source of a lot of pain for me. Because I don't know how much of that I created for him. And when he died, it was very hard for me.

David, I finally, after two kids not being able to get through that system--Bob fought back, he fought back hard and it was okay. David, I sent him to live with a friend in Berkeley, to finish school in Berkeley High School. I gave up on that system. At that point, I was ready to move back into the area. My marriage had pretty much ended and I gave up the house and came to live in Berkeley and 01:39:00went to work at the university. That was you know, Dori--now see, David, I took out of the public school all together and put him in private school when he was in the 3rd grade. And he stayed in that 3rd grade until he went to high school. Then he went to high school for two years.

WILMOT: Which private school did you put him into?

SOSKIN: {Pinell?}, which was a school out in the Alhambra Valley. It was wonderful. It was a school that was patterned after {summary?} and kids would learn at their own pace and do what they wanted to do. In fact, that's where Dori went until she was ready for school and that worked for her, too. So, I gave up on the schools, because by that time, the area I thought was really--it was too much to ask children to go through the system.

WILMOT: An all white environment?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I couldn't do it.

WILMOT: Did you ever follow the story of what happened to that young black couple out in Pleasanton?

SOSKIN: They did move in. I don't know if they stayed. I hadn't met them before 01:40:00that evening; I did go out to meet them. I think she was a nurse or studying to be a nurse and he was truck driver, I think. They were much, much younger than I was; they were young. I think they may have had one child at the time. But that was the beginning of my activism, I think.

WILMOT: Can you describe that community of the Unitarian liberals? Who were they and what were they like? What kinds of activities?

Soskin

Oh it was pretty fantastic. Yeah, very much so. There was an attorney, his name was David {Borton?} who was at that meeting of the Improvement Association in Pleasant Hill, who came up and made himself known to me that evening. We became 01:41:00pretty good friends. Then I began to attend--there was no Unitarian church at the time. There was a group of Unitarians who used to meet in private homes. And when I had discovered that this was non-Creole, and had no dogma, and was absolutely a group of searchers who were willing to come together and agree there were no answers but that we would explore the questions, that this fit philosophically where I was in my own life. But when I found that their politics was as open as it was, equally as much as the spiritual lives, then this became a group that was important to me. I became very active in that group, which eventually became a small fellowship that rented space and now has a beautiful church in the center of Walnut Creek.

The minister that we finally called to serve that congregation--I think we were 01:42:00at that time something like maybe a hundred families--was Aaron Gilmartin and we brought him there, because of his Civil Rights record actually. He was just a phenomenal man and became my mentor and dearest, dearest friend for years and years, Aaron Gilmartin and his wife.

WILMOT: Was he African American?

SOSKIN: No. He wasn't. But he was out of Boston but had come in through Ethical Culture, I think at one point, or the Fellowship for Reconciliation and was a close associate of A.J {Musby?} who was a very well known civil rights advocate at the time. Gil did fantastic work in that community and as Walnut Creek was growing, the people who were the movers and shakers when that city was forming were members of that church. The mayor was Doug {Page?} who was a member of the 01:43:00church; Howard {Diller?} who was head of pediatrics with Kaiser which was very small; the head of the Heart Association was--I mean, all the people who were the movers and shakers of that area were coming pretty much out of that church. Kim Kimble, who was one of the founders of the BART system, he was the first general manager, came out of that church.

So these were very effective people and I became one of them, and this was where I was able to test my metal against a lot of things. In fact, when the Black Caucus formed in that denomination nationally, I wasn't sure whether it was a step forward or a step backward. Because I worked toward integration for so 01:44:00long, and here were black intellectuals in New York who were stepping out of the Unitarian Church and forming a black caucus, which looked like a step backward to me. But our minister, who was Aaron Gilmartin, attended that New York meeting when the blacks walked out. He came back and convinced me that this was something that I needed to know about, that there was something new going on in the denomination, and it was important, it was a very important move, and it was something that we had to go through together. So that church supported me in exploring the black movement nationally. They sent me back to Chicago to the first Black Conference. With a silent vote as to whether or not that church 01:45:00would support the Black Caucus, they were only two people who voted against it. This was a secret ballot. And they were both people not who were against the Black Caucus but who were afraid they would {______?} if they supported it. So it was {______?} all the way around. And it was out of that my working for the Panthers came directly out of my association with that church.

I was going into town because my feeling was that there was a role for a middle class black, and that was to be a conduit to power and that no one was going to hand power to a guy standing on the corner with a brick in his hand. That wasn't going to happen during that time. But I was choking on power. I could've parked my car in the middle of City Hall lawn and nobody would say anything, because at 01:46:00that point I was black and had a strong liberal community supporting me. So my duty I thought was to go into town and to be active in the Black Movement and to be a conduit to power into that community. So I was collecting money and taking it in to support black causes, but doing that as an individual in the white community.

WILMOT: You collected money from Unitarian--your other congregation members, and you moved that to Black Panthers?

SOSKIN: Yeah! Money that people wanted to support that cause. You never know, but out of that Black Caucus--I wasn't ever sure what the aim of the Black Caucus was. The kinds of people who were there--Henry Hampton, for instance, was 01:47:00one of the leaders, he was the guy who put together "Eyes on the Prize." Henry was out of Boston, he had Blackside Production Company. Henry was one of the leaders in that group and it was that group that I later connected with nationally. They caused me to rethink my position totally. I attended three Black Caucus meetings, one in Chicago, one in Detroit, and one in Cleveland. The people who were involved were Lerone Bennett who worked with Ebony Magazine.

WILMOT: [Before the] Mayflower.

SOSKIN: Yeah, Mayflower. That's where I met Jesse Jackson; he was a speaker at the Chicago caucus, fiery guy. Hayward Henry, who changed his name, he's now what? [Mtongolese?]. Do you know him?

WILMOT: No.

SOSKIN: Okay. He was out of Boston U. But this was now another group, there was this small in group of transported Creoles that I grew with. Then there was the huge in-migration of fundamentalist African-Americans who became the war generation. Then there was this third group of black intellectuals that I was involved with nationally that was an entirely different group of people. This had nothing to do with color, but was thoroughly political during a time of 01:49:00great change. So that these worlds of--I mean they were all very different.

WILMOT: What year were those Black Caucus meetings? The three you mentioned Boston, New York? I'm not sure if I ever asked.

SOSKIN: I'm not very good on dates. Late sixties and seventies.

WILMOT: How did you go and locate and cultivate a connection with the Black Panthers?

SOSKIN: How did I even meet up with the Panthers? I'm trying to think. This was when they were demonstrating down at the courthouse and I would drive in from Walnut Creek and march with them. That's the way I met Catherine Cleaver and Eldridge. I didn't ever meet Huey, because he was at that time already in jail. 01:50:00And it was the protest against his being in jail, because that was the whole Free Huey movement. So that's when I connected with them.

I remember collecting moneys at one point, and Aaron Gilmartin drove me to San Francisco in his little Volkswagen and we went up to their apartment, to the Cleavers and dropped off checks. I met at one time at someone's house on Tunnel Road, there was a meeting of the Panther group. I went that night to bring money. Never great amounts, but people who wanted to connect with them.

But these were the same people who wanted to--when something would happen in the Bay Area, like the hosing down of the people, the HUAC demonstrations and then the House Un-American Activities Committee, they would ask me about that stuff. 01:51:00And I would say, "I don't know. I mean what do I know about that?"

WILMOT: They, meaning the liberals?

SOSKIN: Yeah. And for a while there, this felt like this was an okay thing to say, "I mean I don't know, why should I know any more than you do. I'm just the suburban housewife too."

WILMOT: But you came to represent for them in some --

SOSKIN: The point was that I finally decided that they were asking me, and therefore I had to somehow involve myself enough to be able to answer those questions. Because that's the only way they were going to know. So that sometimes that's what I would do. I remember calling Gil one day and saying, "I'm going over to San Francisco and you need to know that I'm there in case I get put in jail, because I'm going get arrested."

But I went out and walked those tracks at Port Chicago around the Peace Movement, standing on the side of the road with the Friends who were protesting. 01:52:00That was the time when I really discovered something about myself. I had gotten used to acting independently and that felt good. I mean, I was able to take stands and initiate actions because I was so isolated out there. But one day I heard about a demonstration out on the road out to Port Chicago where the American Friends were stopping munitions trucks that were going in to be unloaded. So I drove out there and went out and stood on the side of the road.

And for the first time, I realized that I could protest a war, because I didn't really know what a war was, but that I knew what a truck was. And I was standing here and those trucks would come and they would drive just close enough so that we would have to back up to keep from being run over. There were cars were 01:53:00passing us filled with families who would hold up their middle finger as they passed us with their children in the car. And the feeling that I was causing those people to do that, that somehow because I was standing there--I had never been so confused. That's the first time I really felt thoroughly confused.

And then, there was a young African American kid who looked like a teenager who came and was not a part of--there weren't anymore than ten or maybe twelve of us standing here, me and people I didn't know, just American Friends. And this kid who was behind us, maybe a few feet, not really part of us, but not not one of us. He was by himself. At one point, I saw him pull out a knife. I didn't have 01:54:00the feeling that he wasn't one of us. But the Friends I knew were going to not fight back, they were going to be peaceful demonstrators. But I didn't know what this kid was going to do if somebody attacked us in any way. I mean, I felt like he was not a part of the philosophy of the Friends and that he was coming from some place else.

I remember becoming so confused that I picked up my skirts and I ran and got in my car and drove home feeling thoroughly disgraced, because I had been great around war, but I was terrified of trucks and I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do. I remember going to church and explaining to Gil that I had failed, that I couldn't live up to my expectations for myself and his telling me we can only do what we can do and I must not do that and that the opportunity would rise 01:55:00again to do something else. And I did. And I was able some years later, to go back to Port Chicago and be on the tracks with a guy who had his legs run over. But I wasn't there when that happened, but he actually lost his leg. That's when I became a real activist, during those years, because I learned in Walnut Creek that there was no such thing as a middle class black except in the minds of a middle class black.

WILMOT: I was just struck when you told me you went to the Cleavers' house, or the apartment--where did they live?

SOSKIN: They lived up in the Fillmore District. They lived in a flat not far off, I don't think I can find it now, but it wasn't that far up--what's the 01:56:00street you come in when you get off at Franklin? Is it Oak?

WILMOT: Oak.

SOSKIN: It's not far from Oak, either one or two blocks north of there but in the Fillmore area.

WILMOT: You said you drove to town to pick up people to come and speak to the congregation. Did I misunderstand you?

SOSKIN: Oh yeah. The days came when we actually did a fundraiser in Walnut Creek, in which we brought a black dance company--my church sponsored it--Danny Duncan who eventually died of AIDS, but we brought performers out there into Walnut Creek and did things.

3-01:57:30

WILMOT: What was your children's relationship with your activism at this point?

SOSKIN: I think I was an embarrassment to Rick, maybe, because he wanted 01:57:00everything to be quiet. He couldn't afford to have--I don't remember Rick's ever participating. I remember Bob as being pretty much on the edge of the crowd, but I remember taking them with me one day at the annual Walnut Festival every year in the fall. That year was right after the bombing of the church in Birmingham.

Our church got one of the dealerships to give us a convertible and I rode and sat in the back of the convertible in black with the black thing over my head and my children in the car. And a Japanese member of our church, the only 01:58:00Japanese member was driving, I think. Anyway, our church--Robin was Jewish, our church was pretty well integrated to the extent we could be out there, but we did represent and we had signs on the side of our car saying, "Our community cares." Trying to bring people's attention to the bombing of that children, and it was just a week or so after it happened.

I remembered that they kept--two or three hours went by and they wouldn't let our convertible in. We just didn't know why we weren't--units were getting together, they were on the high school football field and all the cars and floats getting ready to get in. They kept putting us back and putting us back and putting us back and they finally allowed us in. But only our convertible was 01:59:00allowed to ride in, there was almost a block between the unit ahead of us and unit behind us. And as we were going down the street, it was very quiet except occasional hiss. I remembered thinking about my children in the car and knowing that they couldn't possibly understand what was happening. Now there were people who put up their hands and waved, but you know they were largely people who I already knew. But testing the metal of that community, which I found myself doing every now and then, as often as not disappointed me. I thought we were making progress when we really weren't.

WILMOT: What was your husband's relationship with your activism?

SOSKIN: My husband and I were living very separate lives. We were very active parents, but he was involved in the children's lives to the extent that he could be. But he was very much involved in Berkeley, that's when he was doing all the 02:00:00promoting, and he and Paul were putting together those concerts and bringing in Marvin Gaye and Shirley Caesar and R&B people as well as gospel people. They had a very separate life, and I was not a part of that.

WILMOT: That must've been so amazing, considering that you had been such a close part of it in the beginning. How did this store and by extension your husband's life, how was it impacted by black power and black consciousness?

SOSKIN: He was identifying very strongly with the black church movements. And he was peripherally involved in my church life. We really lived different lives at that period and there were years when that was so. We were being financially supported very well. We were taking the kids on trips together when he took the 02:01:00time. But our daily lives were not connected. He would leave at seven in the morning and come back at twelve or midnight and day after day after day. The kids knew him as the guy who shaved in the morning in the bathroom. I mean, he was just not a part of our lives. He was not around to be the disciplinarian, so he was Santa Claus and the kids adored him. But there was very little companionship between the two of us. We lived very separate lives.

WILMOT: Do you remember when JFK was shot and Martin Luther King was assassinated and Malcolm X?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I was already in therapy at the time, because I was already assessing this life that I was living, you know, where we were. All the black stuff was going on, I was very much a part of all that. When JFK was killed, I 02:02:00was at home and I think I had a therapy session at twelve o'clock. And my sister was dying. My sister died and Kennedy died within hours. That assassination and Margie's life ended about the same time. She was four years older than I was. So in that period, it all sort of runs together, because within hours, I was on the train with my kids heading for Los Angeles to bury my sister. And the entire train was in mourning for Kennedy so that it was all one piece for me.

WILMOT: Okay, would you stop for one second? Okay we are going to pause. We are 02:03:00at a two hour mark, so what I like to do is just take a quick break and then come back and talk about Martin Luther King, if you have a memory of that happening, and Malcolm X, if you have a memory of that. And then I have a question for you about--I guess I should just ask the question but I'm supposed to telling you about it, but I had this question about communism. Because my understanding was that communism was actually very common, people were communist and it was common in the black community in the 1940s.

SOSKIN: I was never communist, but it was mostly because I was never a joiner. But I had been told that I'm a Marxist, though I've never read Karl Marx. So that I think it would be easy for someone to assume that I had at some point been involved in the Communist Party.

WILMOT: Plus it was just during that time in West Oakland.

SOSKIN: But the communists were doing all the best stuff. [laughs]

WILMOT: Yeah, we have to talk about that. Let see, do you want to take a break and stretch.

SOSKIN: I am. It's true that most of the exciting people that I knew were communist! Really! I think that Gil was at least a socialist, Aaron Gilmartin. I'm sure he was a socialist. And I'm not even sure that I understand the difference between all of those things. [interview interruption]

SOSKIN: I was saying that Margie had died the same that Kennedy did. Those two deaths are so blended in my mind that I had hard time separate them out. In fact, I don't think I ever really was allowed to grieve for Margery, because everything was in grief mode, everything, the whole country and the world was. Marge's death got lost in it.

WILMOT: What did she end up doing with her life in L.A?

SOSKIN: We were separated for many years. I didn't know her very much after she moved to Southern California. She lived in Kansas City before then. So we 02:04:00weren't particularly close, but I feel her loss.

WILMOT: Yeah. She's your sister. You were companions when you were little. Do you remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated?

SOSKIN: Yes. That was an awful time. I think I felt more hopeless when he was killed than when Kennedy was killed, because by that time, I was firmly, firmly black identified and had been active politically throughout that whole period. 02:05:00And his loss, I felt that it was the prelude to the kind of anger that I really expected. There was some writing, but I had looked at it and thought it was going to be even more. But that was an awful time.

WILMOT: When Malcolm X was assassinated?

SOSKIN: I had begun to see Malcolm X and Martin Luther King pretty much as one in that because of what I knew of white racism, because I had lived so much of it leading up to that period. I was under the impression that Malcolm X was making possible the work of Martin Luther King. Even though they appeared to be 02:06:00two very separate approaches, I felt they really weren't at all.

WILMOT: When you say that, what do you mean?

SOSKIN: That the threat of a Malcolm X was making possible the kind of non-violence that Martin Luther King was preaching. And that King's work would not have been nearly as possible as it was and he would not have appealed as across race line to the extent that he did without of the threat of Malcolm X.

WILMOT: How did your congregation receive the messages of the two men? How receptive were they to--?

SOSKIN: I think that they were as devastated by both those deaths. I think that we shared that. At least I was under the impression that there may have been those who weren't as touched as I thought they were. But I was so much a part of 02:07:00that group and was expressing that belonging-ness so inclusively. All of that was being played out, I was even in the pulpit from time to time. I mean it was very participatory; the congregation was often speaking as the minister was. So I think that we were universally affected.

WILMOT: Did you feel like your congregation was more receptive to one message over the other?

SOSKIN: I supposed as the country was. I think that the country was a little bit afraid of Malcolm X and was not as afraid of--I think that fear was a big factor there. And I think that they would've had to be more touched by the loss of King, because they saw him as a savior and they weren't sure what Malcolm X meant.

WILMOT: How in your communication in the late 60s as you got more connected to 02:08:00the Black Caucus or experienced--how did the Black Caucus of the Unitarian Church place itself when or negotiate those two different--Malcolm versus Martin Luther, or was there that kind of tension?

SOSKIN: My involvement was largely before the assassination of King. The Black Caucus preceded that. In fact, I was in Detroit at a Black Caucus meeting annual, it was the second or third of them. It was in February before the spring assassination of King. I remember someone saying to me there, "Watch the Poor 02:09:00People's March." And that has haunted me, because I didn't know what that meant then. I don't know what that means now. It was as if someone knew that there was going to be an attempt on Martin Luther King's life. Still, I've never figured that out.

WILMOT: What context was this said to you in?

SOSKIN: I was having lunch with one of the officers in the caucus and I was talking about Dr. King at the time. I can't remember what had happened recently with him, but I remember those words. There's this guy saying--oh, we were talking about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King actually, the conversation was about the two of them. And this guy said, "Watch the Poor People's March. Just watch the Poor People's March." Now he had gone to demonstrate with the garbage workers, wasn't it? This was preliminary to the Poor People's March. It was that 02:10:00spring that he was killed. This person was from another part of the country, it wasn't someone that I knew locally. But I always felt that there was a lot of going on that I didn't know about and there probably was, that I wasn't even aware.

WILMOT: Were you the only black person involved in your congregation member?

SOSKIN: Actually there was one other couple who were part of the church, but they didn't get passed--integration was their goal and this was a step back for them. And it would've been mine had it not been for Aaron Gilmartin who said, "Go and see. Go and experience this. You've got to see what this is, because maybe we have to move separately in order to move together."

WILMOT: That must've been such a powerful experience.

SOSKIN: Oh, he was so empowering! I mean I cannot tell you how empowering this man was. Because I went reluctantly. And he was right, he was absolutely right that we had to move and find ourselves before we have anything to negotiate. And that's what the caucus was about. And ultimately that's what served me; it gave me a sense of my own identity and what there was to be negotiated that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

WILMOT: I wonder also about--you became very involved in this congregation at the same time that you had this other strong connections to the black churches through your race music and gospel music store.

SOSKIN: That was an experience that Mel was having. That wasn't one I was having at the time. I didn't get that connection until after he moved out and I moved in and it became my world then. But it certainly influenced the way I dealt with that world, and it also made me comfortable in that world in ways I couldn't have been had not gone through the whole political thing, because I moved into it pretty whole.

WILMOT: I wanted to backtrack. I had this question which I hadn't asked you that I've been meaning to ask you. As someone who was in Oakland and the Bay Area during the late 30s, 40s, 50s--I always hear stories about this very kind of active communist community that included people like Matt Crawford and others, Joseph Johnson--

SOSKIN: Mel's uncle, he was William Patterson, he was a part of that.

WILMOT: I just want to ask you what was that like for you? How in the air, how common was it that people were part of the communist party?

SOSKIN: I think I probably had the same reaction to it as any other ordinary little person that didn't have much exposure to anything would have. I didn't know what a communist was. There were people like Matt Crawford that I certainly knew, I remember being at Matt Crawford's house at a party one Sunday afternoon with a group of young people when Paul Robeson was in town. The reason we were there was because we were going to picket with Paul Robeson at the Paramount Theater, where Song of the South was being played and was being shown.

WILMOT: When was this?

SOSKIN: Oh, I don't remember now. It must've been--

WILMOT: Is this after your marriage or--?

SOSKIN: I think--oh, I think I was married. I think I was married. But we played spin the bottle at Matt Crawford's 02:14:00house and I got kissed on cheek by Paul Robeson.[laughing] I think about that now, and think, wow, I was a part of history. I knew that Matt Crawford was something called a communist. I knew when I first joined the Berkeley Co-op when I was within the first thousand people who joined, which later was a huge operation.

But the first people who had founded that pretty much, I had been told, were communists. And I hesitated to join in the beginning because Matt Crawford was on that board. There were other people that I knew. But in time, the most active people that I knew--the most interesting people that I knew were people who were involved in the Communist Party though I've never been one. I don't think it ever came to me to make that decision. I mean, I don't remember ever being asked 02:15:00to join the communist party. And I'm not sure that I knew then or that I know now what that meant, except that the people I knew who were such great people who were doing all kinds of wonderful things.

WILMOT: Were they kind of very central in the black community or were they very kind of comfortably part of the black community?

SOSKIN: I think so. But the communist group was a well-integrated group, I'm sure. Because the people that I knew were not--I wouldn't have thought of them as a black group by any means. I know that as I say, Aaron Gilmartin who was such a strong mentor in my life was certainly a socialist. I'm not sure what the differences between socialism and communism. It all sort of blends for me, but 02:16:00it's also true that the most politically active people that I know who'd been labeled as such had been people who'd impressed me.

WILMOT: Do you want to say who they were?

SOSKIN: Oh heavens, who would they be? First, they'd be Matt, and some early co-op members that I don't know if I would mention names of. {Geb?} who I suspect--I guess I have a feeling that even among communists, that it's easier to say that you are a socialist than to say that you are a communist. I think that these people when I think of them, I think them as one group of people and there were a number of them in the Unitarian Church, but they were among the most politically active that I knew.

WILMOT: Did you know someone named Walter Green?

SOSKIN: That sounds familiar.

WILMOT: He was a boxer, I believer and became a reporter in Richmond.

SOSKIN: No, I don't know.

WILMOT: He was a reporter for People's World.

SOSKIN: No, I guess not.

WILMOT: Okay. Well, let's see. I want to move on to Berkeley Co-op. You haven't told me very much about what that meant for you?

SOSKIN: It was just a store for me. I was never involved. Mel was on the board of the credit union for a short period.

WILMOT: There was a credit union in a grocery store?

SOSKIN: Yeah. It was Twin Pines Savings and Loan and a credit union and there was a consumers co-op, which was a grocery store. We did attend the summer camp at Camp Sierra with co-op people two or three times. But it was not all so 02:18:00social. It was a social life for a lot of people but this was not something that I was involved in socially. I didn't buy into that much of it.

WILMOT: Can you tell me a little bit, I want to shift gears now and move to your move out of Walnut Creek back to Berkeley. I want to know what precipitated that and then also about your work at UC Berkeley? But first I ask how did that move come? How did that happen and where did you move to?

SOSKIN: I don't know what some of that would've been. I guess I always envisioned that when I would hit fifty or whatever that age is that magic age of forty-eight, forty-nine, that I'd be going to be an older lady and I would get out my purple shawl and collect my social security check. And my kids would all 02:19:00leave home at different times because they were spread out, they were not all bunched up age wise. But I found myself one summer living in a four bedroom, two bathroom house out in the suburbs with a swimming pool in the backyard and I was all by myself.

That summer, Rick had taken a--I guess he just turned twenty or twenty-one, he'd taken an apartment in Oakland, in town. David was work-study in Switzerland. He'd gone with a young friend from Berkeley High School and they had done the exchange student thing, so they were gone. Bob had gone with me to a Unitarian convention back in Cleveland and it was his last year of high school. And 02:20:00because he was not going to graduate, he had decided that--he had gone into a real run-in with the school, standing on principle, and I backed him--I took him with me to Cleveland. So when we left there, he had decided that he wanted to hitch hike home across Canada and he was seventeen and I said yes. [chuckles] And Dori was in a boarding school; she was over in Marin. Mel, of course, we had grown apart pretty much and he was in town doing his thing. And here I was all by myself.

That was the year when I was elected by the people in my congressional district to serve as a McGovern delegate to Miami to the convention. So that I went to 02:21:00Miami and the house was empty and I came back and I didn't know what I was going to do. Because here I was, I didn't have any models ahead of me for what was life like for older women. I was still relatively young and active, but I was supposed to be, you know, when the kids go away from home, you are supposed to be an older lady, I thought.

WILMOT: Your mother's life wasn't the model?

SOSKIN: No. That wasn't a model, for my mother had never really been out of the house, she was just home. But when I got back from Miami, I went to one of those life-changing seminars. What are they called? When you re-entering the work force. And I had not been in the work force actually; I've been raising kids all those years after we moved to the country.

So I took this course at the church and one of the people giving the seminar had 02:22:00just been hired as a supervisor on a research project at the University of California, and we were in this course for a couple of weeks. And he came to me one day and said that he had just accepted this job as a supervisor on a project called, Project Community at University of California in Berkeley. He wondered if I'd liked to come on and be a part of his staff. And I said, "Well, I don't know, I'll come and see if I like it." I mean, I know that's not the way you get jobs, you know. But I said, "I tell you what, I'll come to work for you for two weeks, you don't have to pay me. And if I like it, I'll stay and if I don't like, I won't." I mean, that's not the way you get a job, but he accepted that. And I went. The man that I married was the principle investigator of this 02:23:00research project.

WILMOT: Is that where you met?

SOSKIN: That's when I met Bill. I went there as an assistant to the director of that program. And within a matter of few weeks, Bill and I were an item. It was quick, and it was an answer. I didn't ever go back home to that empty house. I began to stay in Berkeley and I entered a whole new life at the University of California and I didn't re-connect with my old life on this side of the hills. I started a whole brand new life; it was like he was a new page. And in time, we were married and I became a faculty wife. And it was ten years and fascinating. 02:24:00So where are we now?

WILMOT: I'm going to need to take a quick pause and change this disc here.

[interview interruption while recording media are exchanged]

WILMOT: Okay. So we are on again.

SOSKIN: So where were we?

WILMOT: You were talking about how your new life with Bill Soskin kind of unfolded out of your--what was that project that you were working on?

SOSKIN: That was called Project Community. It was fascinating. My son David had been in that program when he was in Berkeley High School, the year before, and 02:25:00knew Bill as a director of that program. A principal investigator with that program was Dr. Shelly Korchin out of Tolman Hall at UC Berkeley. The program was studying the drug culture or at least developing drug prevention program for teens that grew out of his study of the Haight. He came out from Washington on a grant to study the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon--the "flower child" thing.

WILMOT: Professor Soskin?

SOSKIN: Yeah. Out of that grew--he came up with some answers to the drug problem and he was testing out his hypothesis through this program, which was called Project Community.

WILMOT: He was a psychologist?

SOSKIN: Yes, he was a research psychologist. His program--[phone rings]

WILMOT: Hold on one second. [interview interruption]

SOSKIN: Oh, he developed this prevention program and they worked on five high school sites. They were a group of doctoral students, candidates out of UC psych [Psychology] department. He combined them with a group of artists to work with children in these special programs. I started out in the administration and wound up, before it was over, working with other people, co-leading groups actually in the schools, which was a real learning experience for me.

So I got to do the kinds of things that--it's interesting, some of the people who were involved in that, to enrich this courses, one was {Terry Sandgraft?}. She does area work too. She still works with dance. He had a fascinating group of artists who worked in that--I think that's when my art became prominent in my life, too. Is through Bill. And music had been a part of it for much longer than that, but I got to know more dancers and people who were doing visual arts. But that whole experience was completely different from anything that I'd ever lived with in my entire my life, because Bill's world was a very different one.

WILMOT: How was it different?

SOSKIN: It was different in that--how is it different? It's different and it's 02:28:00the same. I saw a lot of hypocrisy that was not unlike what I knew outside in other contexts. I think I had rather naively believed that the greater the intelligence the greater the ethical sense and that turned out to not bear up. I saw tremendous amounts--the competition in that world is just huge, which was new for me. I don't know, it just gave me a whole new way to look at life. I embraced a lot of it and I also had enough outside experience to measure it 02:29:00by--pretty objectively. So it didn't do any harm to me at all.

But, coupled with being on the campus as a part of academic life, the opportunity to go back into the ghetto, to go back to South Berkeley was thrust upon me, because Mel's health went out and the business was in failure. I was living a life of an academic wife, while I was going down trying also to be a businesswoman in the black community. And that truth eventually became impossible. I had lived most of my life on a bridge interpreting one side for the other side. The whole time I was in Walnut Creek, I was telling the white 02:30:00folks what the black folks meant, and the black folks what the white folks meant and I was doing this bridge thing. And that's the way I sensed my role and I'd accepted that and it had worked for me for a while.

When I was in Berkeley, when I came back, I found myself more and more and more using what I found in the white community to make things work in the black community. Eventually I couldn't do both, I had to make a choice. I had to decide which side of that line I was going to be on and that's when I really became black. I mean, the role of the black merchant got bigger for me. The work to be done in the black community was facilitated by my other life, but I couldn't stay there and do it. I had to be in the black community and that 02:31:00worked for me. I mean that's what really meant the most for me.

WILMOT: What is the life of an academic wife? What does that mean?

SOSKIN: I think it can best be described by my first academic dinner parties in Orinda. There was this very well known psychologist visiting--he was the visiting professor from University of Michigan, had a beautiful wife. We were invited to dinner with two other couples and that was the evening I sat and listened and saw the game, where the wife's role was to maneuver the conversation around to her husband's latest theory. And I could tell when it would almost get there, and somebody else would cut it off, and then she'd wait 02:32:00until it got--and I got to recognizing, because I knew Bill's theories, and I knew how to get there. Because almost every Sunday morning when we'd have breakfast, Bill would pontificate on his latest--and they were brilliant theories. I mean he was brilliant man; his theories were great. But I always could recognize them; I could recognize when the changes came and when they were really innovative. And I would know when he would toss me lines at these parties what I was to say in order to move it around to where it was supposed to go. It was like, scripted, and I wasn't sure if anybody else was seeing the pattern that I was seeing. I remember stubbornly not participating and Bill becoming more and more irritated, because I wouldn't move the conversation.

On the way home, I told him I would never go to another one. And he admitted that's really what was going on. That's the first time I began see a whole level of interplay that I had no way to even be aware of before I became an academic wife. There really was a prescribed role, very, very prescribed. Now that might not be true in all places, and it's probably true of a particular age group and we were older. I don't that can be true anymore; I think the woman has blown that one off.[laughs] But at the time, that was true.

WILMOT: What year were you married to Bill Soskin?

SOSKIN: Well. What would that have been? Seventies? It was the year after the McGovern convention. I don't know. Seventy-six? Somewhere around there.

WILMOT: You are married for ten years, you were together for ten years?

SOSKIN: Yeah.

WILMOT: I'm wondering in the time you were at Berkeley as an academic wife, did you stay employed at that time on his project?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I stayed on his project for five years and then the next five years I was working down the hill.

WILMOT: Did you encounter other black people who were faculty members during that time?

SOSKIN: Yeah. There were a few. I don't remember them now. I remember different faculty people at different times, but I don't know if they were--. Was there anybody in my own social life? I'm trying to think. I can't remember. There were 02:35:00others that I met on campus, afterward, because I worked at city hall right after, I went to city hall, I worked as Don's aide, so I knew other people later. But I was not a part of a black life on campus by any means.

WILMOT: But you were part of the academic circles of your husband?

SOSKIN: Yeah. I was part of his circle of friends. There were largely in public health and in--oh! The human potential movement, that was, you know, during the seventies and eighties. That was such a big thing. So many of our friends were involved in the human potential movement, Esalen and all that stuff.

WILMOT: What is the human potential movement?

SOSKIN: Oh God, you are young! [laughs] The human potential movement? It's the new tooth period, as I say. You don't know about the Esalen Institute?

WILMOT: I do know about Esalen.

SOSKIN: Or Werner Erhard and his group. Yeah, well, Bill went after all those things. I didn't. I refused. But, yeah. That was the human potential movement. He knew Timothy Leary and the physicists who were making all the noise. He was very deeply involved in Tibetan Buddhism, which I also did not get into. My life during that period was also full of poets and I knew poets and performed with poets. That was before Bill. That wasn't the same period. That was a wonderful period. That bookshelf over 02:37:00with all the books--a lot of them were given to me by poets that I've performed with in one place or another.

WILMOT: Well, what was that time in your life about, performing with the poets?

SOSKIN: Oh, that was wonderful! That was wonderful. I would go in and sing my songs as a poet. I could accept being a poet, where I couldn't accept being a singer. So I often worked with other poets. So when it come to my turn, I would sing my poetry. It was a wonderful period.

WILMOT: What were you writing poems about then?

SOSKIN: Pretty much introspective things as I was working my way through my own life.

WILMOT: As poets often do.

SOSKIN: Yeah.

WILMOT: [pause] We are really moving really rapidly through my outline right 02:38:00now. I want to ask you a little bit about your political--you currently work for Assemblywoman Dion Aroner and I want to ask you what the trajectory was like for you? How did you get to be--you said you were working for Don Perata?

SOSKIN: No, Don Jelinik.

WILMOT: Sorry, Don Jelinik. Excuse me.

SOSKIN: Well, I've been political pretty much without intending to be political. The thing is that I'm convinced that politics is just a part of life and for me it's really integrated. I can after the fact say that was political, but in the process, it doesn't mean very much. When I took over the store, because I knew it could never be financially successful and had to have another goal, then I 02:39:00went about the job of seeing what I needed to do to make it that. I often say that when I was much younger I had visions of changing the world, that's the poet side of me--or the state, but I finally got so, I broke it down to five hundred feet and everything within my five hundred feet was going to have to shape up, and that's really kind of the way it was for me. I would have a problem and try to figure it out how it gets solved. And I would go to city hall and see whom I had to see and get it change. So my work politically was very much integrated with that store.

When I first went down there, it was approaching election time. The tenants in 02:40:00my building, the second floor was rented out to people who were giving me a great deal trouble, and who I suspected were not honest people, and might be contributing to what was going on the street. Because remember now, this was all a drug infested area. I went to one of my husband's close friends and a shaker and mover in the city, it was Miss Carol Sibley, who sort of ushered in the program that integrated the Berkeley schools, the head of the whole busing thing. She was a very strong, very powerful leader.

I went to her and I said, "You know, this is what's going on here and I'm in the heart of it and I need help." And she called in someone, naming names again, but it's true, so I'm going to name her anyway, Shirley Dean, who later became the 02:41:00most recent mayor of Berkeley. And she had the two of us to lunch one day, and said, "We'll just talk with Shirley about it." Because Shirley was one of her closest friend, and she said, "I'm sure that Shirley can help you." So the three of us had lunch together, and Shirley said that she's sorry that the guy that I was mentioning was someone that she felt --anybody that could deliver the votes in South Berkeley that she couldn't afford to, you know, truck with. So she refused to help me. And I was in a really dangerous situation down there.

So I went back to my store, and she was in this race against who was to be our first black mayor, who is Gus Newport. No, I guess he followed Warren Widener. Anyway, Gus Newport was running against her for mayor. So in the community where I was, which was supposed to be her territory, I plastered my building with Gus 02:42:00Newport signs. I guess, you know, every place I found, I filled that building up. Then I went up and down the street to all other merchants and delivered Gus Newport signs. Just that simplistic, I figured that, you know, I need help and she's not going to give to me, so I'm going to stop this.

But the next day, when I looked up and drove down from Grizzly Peak into South Berkeley and looked, the signs were all turned around, and Shirley Dean's signs are up on their places. And I realized that this man had gone behind me and apparently had harassed the other owners and they didn't care much who was elected. But they were not going to confront him. He'd been around a long time. He was another African American. And I got into a real battle with this guy. And 02:43:00eventually evicted him from my building, just had him out.

This was the first time I began to see how I could move politically because Gus Newport was actually elected mayor. And that's the first time I flexed my political muscles and something happened. And then he appointed me to this task force for these homes through out the city, the scattered site housing, HUD housing. And out of that grew the complete changeover at the block where I was, all because I had decided that I could address whatever this political system was. I learned how to play that game. Every day I would go to City Hall to put in my time, in Don's office. I would sit with the people, all the aides for the other--I had never been an aide before, but I would sit in the staff meetings, 02:44:00planning for the city council meetings and the agendas, and learned all about that process. In the process, I could sit in on any other kind of meetings I wanted to and I attended city council meetings and really begin to learn how the process works. Since then, when I want change, I know that's the way things get changed in a democracy.

It was fascinating to me, too, that during the time when I took over the building and the whole street had been torn up--I guess I mentioned this--there were nothing but mud out in front of the building. The street, they were taking up the tracks, the Santa Fe railroads tracks. While they were doing that, they were under grounding the utilities, along Sacramento Street from Oregon to Alcatraz. So, everything up to the building including the sidewalk was gone. 02:45:00Everything, there's nothing but sawhorses and the street was closed. That's when I went back and Mel's health had failed and I took over this business and that was the state it was in. It stayed that way for a year and half, it was just awful until they got it all put back together again.

But during that process when they put it all back together, they put the sidewalks in and then they put in a bus bench that was about eighteen inches from an eight foot plate glass window in my store, just my window. And the drug dealers--these were kids, I mean they were kids--would sit with their feet on the seat and sit on the backs of this bus bench, which was made of wood but set in concrete--they were iron pipes set in concrete. But they'd sit here and they'd wrestle and I kept waiting for one of them to come crashing through that 02:46:00eight foot plate glass window. And it terrified me! Day after day after day, I would try to get the kids to stay away, and I couldn't. I had to confront the dealers and, you know, raise their ire.

I kept sending letters to the city council and sending letters to the planning commission and sending letters downtown saying, "You've got to change this. You've got to take that bench out, because some kids are going to be hurt." Every time I would do that, the answer I would get back would be, "These benches were put in at the will of the community. And the only way they can come out, because they are part of the beautification project, is if the community comes together and says, 'Take them out.' We cannot do that." So this went on and went on and went on. It took five years. One day--and I'm struggling with all kinds of things in the meantime--but this bus bench became symbolic for me. One day, I came into work and somebody had skipped the curve and hit this bench in their 02:47:00car, and the bench was broken. So I picked up the phone, I called the public service department and said, "You know, I don't want it fixed, just take it away. I don't want it fixed."

I was amazed! because what I found--in my letters I had said, "All the bus benches between Alcatraz and Oregon had become offices, nobody was really getting a bus could use those benches, because they were all offices for the drug dealers." So within the next three days, I got up looked out and went to work, and every bench between Alcatraz and Oregon was gone. And I suddenly learned that I had been publicly putting the city in this position of having to 02:48:00tell me no and giving up their argument about, you know--but if I had quietly allowed them to do it, it could've happened. So the public service just dealt with it, and they came in didn't only take my bus bench out, but they had heard what I was saying all that time. They came in and just took them all out at the same. So that's when I began to learn how things really happen politically and how one has to be strategic.

So that little shop and working in that part of town and having a political agenda, because what I really wanted was social change--financial independence for me was not going to come out of that shop and I knew that--but because I was using it for social change, my eyes and ears were tuned to finding out what were the strategies and which ones worked. So I learned over a long time.

So when political opportunities came up, which was the same way it was with--I volunteered to work for Keith Carson. I sent him a letter when I decided I was going to retire and I didn't get a response, because that's who I would have been working for. I actually simply wanted to volunteer, but nobody answered my letter. In the meantime, Tom Bates, had an opening as a staff person with the {court report?} partnership opened up and I was able to go and work with Tom Bates on outreach in Oakland in the 14th District, after he term-limited out. And out of that grew the opportunity to work for Dion. But even when I went to work for Dion, she interviewed me--I was a friend of an African American woman who was a member of her staff, who was sharing my home in El Cerrito. She told 02:50:00me to apply and I did, but Dion was looking for a young African American male to school and she wanted someone out of Richmond to do that. So she interviewed the two of us and she hired him. That was okay with me, because as I told her, "I would have hired him too." That was what I wanted to do too. But then he didn't work out eventually--I think he was with her for a couple of years. And when she had to let him go, then she hired me to come in and sort of fill in. I thought I was a placeholder. I really thought that I'd come in as a placeholder until we could find someone else to train for that position, because I saw myself in my retirement years actually. But instead, I got fired up again and off I went. So that was three years.

WILMOT: What fired you up?

SOSKIN: Just the work, feeling effective, being able to--as I tell people that 02:51:00my job description was that I get to ask very embarrassing questions at a very high level. I don't have the answers to anything, but I get to sit in on corporate boardrooms and commissions and all kinds of non-profits and county stuff. I get to sit in and analyze what I see and then go back to Dion and say, "This is what's gone on." And I've been able to initiate at least one bill that went through and got signed by the governor.

WILMOT: Which one?

SOSKIN: It was the one on transportation of perishables. There was no legislation to govern that, so that food was being carted around that was perishable at very high temperatures. There were trucks that originated in Reno or in L.A. carrying perishables to the Bay Area, which means those things were on the road for five or six hours. So the more deeply involved--and now I'm at 02:52:00the same place where Dion's going out, and I'm having to decide, am I really going to retire. In preparation for that, I've gotten myself appointed to the arts commission, because what I want to do now, is to use the juice that I've been able put together from being with Dion for three years and learning Richmond politics as well as I have. And work--I'd like to help develop something here in the arts.

WILMOT: What's your dream for the arts?

SOSKIN: I want to create a home in the Bay Area for East Bay black performing artists. I mean, I want to do that and there's a chance to possibly do that with that wonderful [J.C.] Penney's building between 7th and 8th on Macdonald Avenue--it's now vacant. Oh, it's a whole block, and it's a huge place. I'm 02:53:00working with Don Gilmore, who is the head of the housing development corporation, the Richmond Housing Development Corporation. And Jennifer Ross, who's a consultant out of Oakland--Jennifer and I worked at the Upper Room together. So what we both would like to see is not only performance space, rehearsal space, and storage space, but live-work space for artists. We'd like to see--as dealing with artists as a category of people who don't have a designated housing place.

WILMOT: Where did your commitment to the arts come from, Betty?

SOSKIN: I think it grew. It's always been there, because I think underneath the layers, there's an artist that lives in me, she's not a performing artist, but someone certainly--I refer to that as the Betty- behind-my-eyes. I mean that's 02:54:00there, but on top of that, the experience at the Upper Room marked me forever. It's being able to see and appreciate art for what it is, and particularly the art that I saw there, which somehow--it's amazing, at the same time that I am attending political meetings in Berkeley, or even Walnut Creek, where my old church membership is still there and working, I see them reaching for things that when I went to the Upper Room had already been arrived at. It was amazing, things that at the Upper Room with a younger generation of people, you didn't ever hear words like diversity. People assumed certain things. It's as if your 02:55:00generation has always worked through that you are the inheritors of the work that my generation tried to do. And to a large extent the things that you are still working on are different things but a lot of that stuff when I was at the Upper Room, I felt had been accomplished.

I sat one night and watched a young guy from India in what looked like Punjab dress playing a piano and he was playing Round Midnight. I guess Mohammed Bilal was doing something, and there were about three kids dancing to the music. And I'm sitting in this room and looking around it, and realizing that there was no 02:56:00effort involved in creating racial equality. That group in that room worked together around art. They were not together around race or trying to rise out of race or to compensate in some way for their differences. That same night, a young Native American rapped the story of his people. The things that I saw in that building, my age didn't even matter. And I was certainly not trying to be young; I've never tried to be young as such. But age wasn't even a problem. There were people there, certainly not as old as I was, but certainly in their forties and fifties, who were there as artists. I saw the last poets come to perform. Amiri Baraka was there one evening doing his stuff. I saw young rap 02:57:00artists that were just phenomenal but they weren't there because they were black or white, they were there because they were artists. And trying to put that together, these kids, they've accomplished something that the people across town were still working hard without realizing it had already happened.

I don't know if I'm making any sense to you, but it's having the opportunity just to watch those levels of social development simultaneously and to know that that group which later--because now that old Masonic Building was taken over for the Transit Village, it's not even quite finished yet--but we had to move on, because we were pretty much squatters while we were there. But I saw pieces of it go into La Pena, and I saw pieces of it going into San Francisco, and I saw Nevin [Norling] go to New York, and Keba [Konte] went to Sweden or wherever he 02:58:00went. And I saw, you know, all these people breaking off. And I tried hard to secure, at one point the Black Rep Theater in Berkeley to try and house them, because I kept thinking somebody's got to drop a building around this magical thing that I see happening, because it really was and is a magical thing that was there. Jennifer Ross, who at that time was a consultant to San Francisco and she was at the Bayview Opera House where she was doing work. Shakiri, who was with Zaccho, with Joanna Haigood's company. We all recognized what was there and recognized what a magnificent thing this was. And just as movements move out of the Bay Area into the rest of the country, here was this new special thing that was fragile and it had to be housed and we couldn't do it.

What happened was, the same Mayor Dean who had refused to help me out early on 02:59:00years ago when I went to them to try--I tried to get on the board of the Berkeley Rep Theater first of all. Because I went to them and I said to the family that runs it, "What are your dark nights?" I wanted to get on the board and to use it on the nights that it wasn't in use. In that way, I would drop a building around this group of people to give them a home and a hold in the universe. And they became very, very upset and angry and wouldn't accept me on the board. So then I decided, okay, this is a community facility and it's in the hands of this family and we can't get it any other way. So I tried to get the council members that I knew to help me to do that. Mayor Dean went to them and said--it was just before another election, she was running against Don Jelinik who was running for mayor too--and she told the family that if she could be 03:00:00elected, if they would help her get elected, deliver the votes in South Berkeley, that she would sell them the building for a dollar a year. What she did was she eventually found a clause in the lease and she permitted them twenty five more years at no cost to the city to sit in that building and hold it down. And Black Rep does not produce anything for anybody of any worth. So then, I gave that up, because there was no way to do it. Now, the group from the Upper Room--well, Kimiko [Joy] who called today, she was working out at Black Dot--you know, there are different kids doing places. But there is no home for the black performing arts community.

WILMOT: I think Black Dot is starting to become a home.

SOSKIN: I hope so.

WILMOT: Also Alice Arts has been--

SOSKIN: Well, except that Alice Arts--Mayor Brown wants that for his school and so even that's going to go. So what I'm saying is that if I can get Richmond to use some of its redevelopment monies to refurbish that place down there, that's what I'd like to do for the next five years if I've got five more. Because there's nothing that I think is more important in the Bay Area than that. And I'd like to see black performing arts at the same level as Berkeley Rep Theater is at some point and Richmond could do that.

WILMOT: How did you get involved with the Upper Room and Rafiq Bilal?

SOSKIN: Because Rafiq was one of my customers in the record shop. I had made a collection of videos of every black film or any film that any black people had 03:02:00ever been a part of or anybody was in the cast. So when I got into videos, I began to collect, out of every catalogue of every place, black film. I had a tremendous collection, which eventually I turned over to the Upper Room. I don't even know where it is now. It's a tremendous collection, and he needed some money. This is when the Upper Room was in San Francisco.

[interview interruption for phone]

Yeah, Rafiq Bilal, he was running at that time the Upper Room in San Francisco down south of Market, and things were not going well and he came over to the shop with some videos that he had of Africa, and wanted to sell them to me for my collection. I didn't need them, but obviously he needed the money, so that I 03:03:00bought them from him. We became friends at that point. He was about to go and transition--he about being run out of San Francisco pretty much, the police were giving him so much trouble.

Because what happened was that he started the Upper Room as a program out of Glide Memorial and it was a program that was designed for the recovery community that had nowhere to go socially that didn't provide temptation. But what had happened was young people began to come there realizing it was also safe for them. So they establish the first no alcohol, no nicotine club. And that remained an important facet of the Upper Room, even when they moved across the bay. At one point when they discovered that wonderful old building out in 03:04:00Fruitvale, he called me one day and said, "You have to come here and I can't tell you about it on the phone, you have to come." I jumped in my car in front of the shop and I drove out to Fruitvale and saw this incredible building that had what they actually what they called the Upper Room, the secret room upstairs, way upstairs on the third floor that you had to look through a peep hole and they slide back the thing to let you in. Oh it was wonderful! And that day, I saw against the walls, these huge murals that the young people did. One of Nevin's was hanging there.

They invited me to come back the next weekend for an event and it became the place that I lived. I mean, I spent all my time there doing whatever I could to try to keep it going and to try to do what we could. I met other women who were there, Shakiri, that's where I met Jennifer, that's where I met other people, 03:05:00dancers and all kinds of people. This was the place to be. So on Saturday evenings, I would take my grandkids out there. That's when I met Robert Henry [Johnson], the dancer, and playwrights, young people doing all kinds of important things.

The other thing that was fascinating about the Upper Room was that here was a place that was built on black culture. Everyone who was involved did not have to be black, that wasn't the point. But black culture was the base of everything that was going on there. So that the people who came there, the white people who came there, the Indian people who came there, the Native Americans, the Latinos, the Filipino people who came there, came there to participate in black culture. 03:06:00It was just amazing, because it was clearly identified. The gurus were largely black people. They were musicians and artists and poets and dancers but they were coming out of the black tradition. There would be four and five hundred people there on a Saturday night of every color of the rainbow, all relating to black culture. It was just amazing. That's when I began to see black performing arts as needing its own home. And I saw it being a tragedy when that home was pulled out from under them.

Rafiq and I became very close friends, Mohammed, all the kids were all there. I'm still in touch with a number of them. And, you know, Betty's still trying to find a home. [chuckles]

WILMOT: I also wonder about since your time when you were in Walnut Creek, 03:07:00you've been very oriented toward the, I wouldn't call it service, but very much towards social change. You've expressed that it seems to me in a number of different ways through the kinds of work you choose to do. And I just wanted to ask you why do you what you do? Why do you do the work you do for Assemblywoman Aroner? Why did you do the work that your do?

SOSKIN: I wish there was a simple answer to that. I don't know that there is. I found along the way that there's a difference between black people and the black agenda and I find myself at odds with myself sometime around that. Some of the 03:08:00people who have best supported the black agenda have not been black people. So I come at my political work from a different place than I did in the sixties. Then, the black cause in itself was enough. And I crossed some of kind of threshold, I don't know when that was, or where that was, where I separated out the black agenda from blackness. I separated out black culture. [laughs] It reminds me that I was at an arts commission meeting, my first one, the other night, when I found myself saying that, "I had never heard a symphony that I didn't think couldn't be improved with a little Charlie Mingus on bass." I mean, there's that thing about me that knows--that doesn't relate to white culture in 03:09:00the same way that I do to black culture. It is the same with politics. I had no problem supporting Dion Aroner over a black candidate. Because now I've lived long enough to see the Ward Connerlys and the Clarence Thomases, and the Condoleeza Rices. I've lived long enough to know that you've got to keep your eye on what you have decided is the agenda. And that is guiding me now politically, and the things that I do come out of that--always looking for the black agenda and where it ought to be and not letting the cast of characters govern that.

WILMOT: What does that mean to you, what is the black agenda?

SOSKIN: The black agenda is creating freeness in all things, in not allowing discrimination to be legislated into law. I mean it's that kind of thing. You have a right to not want to live next door to me, that's absolutely your right. But I have a right to be there and you have no right to stop me from doing that. It's seeing where those lines are and honoring them and in settling for no less. I mean, that's where I am.

WILMOT: In doing your work currently, who are your partners? Who are the people that you call up when you are just thinking about moving things forward, and who do you strategize with and who are your--?

SOSKIN: At this point, it's Dion's staff, it's a couple of members of Dion's staff, a couple of people in politics in Richmond that I've been able to connect 03:11:00with. It's Barbara Becnel at Neighborhood House who comes out of journalism. She did her graduate work on the justice system and African Americans and is working very, very hard on the anti-death penalty stuff. She's the one that single handedly got two Nobel Prize nominations for Stanley "Tookie" Williams over on death on row, who is now scheduled to be executed next year. She's working hard on that and I worked on that with her. Barbara is certainly one of them. She doesn't come out of the Bay Area; she comes out of L.A. and the East Coast. Barbara, I'm very close to.

Yeah, there's a critical mass of people that I feel like I can reach to that 03:12:00resonate with the things I'm thinking. Yeah, they're here.

WILMOT: Now you are here meaning in some ways while you've been in the Bay Area your whole life, in some ways you are in this new place just in that you are really--. Let me rephrase that, you've been in the Bay Area your whole life, but it's really in the past several years that you really put down roots in Richmond.

SOSKIN: Only in the past three years. That came with my work with Dion.

WILMOT: So, tell me what kind of community you are finding here and how are you finding this work in this community?

SOSKIN: I think that under it all, I'm Berkeleyite. And for a long time, I was sleeping in West County, but living in Berkeley. It took me several years to 03:13:00even to change my voter reg[istration], I wouldn't change my registration because I saw myself as a Berkeley person. When I was living in El Cerrito, you know, I wouldn't go. Somewhere along the line, partly out of that experience of that crazy little record shop on Sacramento Street, where so many of my customers came out Richmond. I can't walk down the street in Richmond without people recognizing me from there. So that my world was bigger than I knew it was.

That base of Richmond church people--you have to understand that along the way, when I stopped selling jazz and R&B and went exclusively into Gospel, I also moved into church supplies and became eventually the largest supplier of Gospel robes and choir robes, choir robes and pulpit robes in the state. Out of that 03:14:00little shop. My son David goes out and measures everybody on a Wednesday night and then the church gets together for two or three months and makes chicken dinners and then they get the money together and they place the order. We probably outfitted most of the churches in the area with their choir robes. And that's what's kept us alive all these years. So the people in this community know me better than I know them.

But it empowered me. In addition, they attribute Charlie Reid to me. I'm Mel Reid's wife, and Mel Reid is Charlie's' nephew. So the people in North Richmond empowered me in ways that I could not have been empowered otherwise. So all those things together provided a base from which to work. So it made my work in Richmond maybe more productive than my work in Berkeley. And now, I'm at home here.

And the other piece is that I'm watching Oakland under Jerry Brown losing its 03:15:00black base over time, and we still have about a three year window here, I think. We have a black city manager, we have a black mayor, we have four members of the city council, we have heavy involvement in all the boards and commissions. The neighborhood council--because we have a neighborhood council set up--there are like thirty-nine neighborhood councils and they all express, you know, whatever the community is like. There is still a forty percent black population. There are things possible here in a black context that are not possible anywhere else in the Bay Area now. So I see it as a frontier. I see it as a cutting edge if we can take advantage of that. And I'd like to be able to give some strength to 03:16:00that by leaning in the direction of constructive change with other people to try to make that more solid. So, I guess I'm home, though when I go to Berkeley, I'm nostalgic.

WILMOT: You have home in different places.

SOSKIN: Yeah. Yeah.

WILMOT: Your son David now runs that record store?

SOSKIN: Oh yeah, he's been there over ten years. I have to stay all the way out. There's nothing I can do part way. So he runs it and he's the Reid.

WILMOT: Well, let's see. I have one quick question to ask you. [interview interruption]

SOSKIN: When I went to that first black power conference in Chicago, I 03:17:00experienced what was then a sort of political black birth.

WILMOT: What year was that?

SOSKIN: I cannot remember the exact year, but it was certainly before I went to Miami. It must've been late sixties. Anyway, I found myself so excited by what I found where I had gone there somewhat resistant to the Black Movement, as I told you, and was encouraged to participate in this. But I found myself seated next to Mrs. Countee Cullen, his widow. These were black intellectuals from all over the country and I came back feeling so high from that experience that I wrote something called, Ebony the Night. It was the experience of blackness as a 03:18:00positive force for the first time. Up to then, it had always been defensive. We are just as good as--that sort of thing. Only for the first time, I came from the other side, which was wow, you know. I wrote this, if I can put it to you all without losing it. It's a song. The verse is,

"As I lie 'neath the stars on this night of my day,

playing the game that some poets play,

find synonyms for black both poetic and good.

Sounds simple? You try. I do wish you would.

The world made the rules and established the ante.

Proclaimed white is sinless and black straight from Dante.

Ebony the night, ebony satin right.

Star jewels held in black velvet hands of ebony the night.

Onyx, set with a dream that weaves through my mind 'til I seem

black born and kiss warm, black jet jazz of love, onyx the dream.

Black image cries behind shuttered eyes trying so hard to be good.

Glaciers in skies of ebony lies,

I sing them away if I could.

Ebony the night, cradle me, the night.

Black chin cupped closed in black velvet hands of ebony the night.

Ebony, ebony the night."

It's a beautiful song.

WILMOT: It's a beautiful song. How does the tune go?

SOSKIN: At some point, I'll give you the tape. I have one somewhere that has it. I don't know where to find it now. I think I wrote that on the plane coming home, but that's when I came home really high. And if there's anything wonderful about my life is that each of these places that I've moved in and out of had been so complete that none of them are half steps. I really was black, I really felt the victory of being that, of reaching that, and realizing it at some point 03:21:00that that was half of the trip, that if I push past that. If everybody went through whatever their revolution was, whether it's gay or brown or yellow or whatever it is, but if you go into it and get stuck, you only made half of the trip. If you really simply proud of that, then you've only made half the trip. But if you go through it all the way and come out the other side, you come out at a place of universality. That's what was incredible for me--to recognize that place. But at the same time, to come at it wholly with my blackness, not Creole, not half way, not light skinned and good haired. None of that stuff. But going through the whole black trip and coming out of that on the other side and finally getting to the place where I wrote to each of me, where I then took back 03:22:00all the parts. And now I have this sense of working out of all of the parts of me but unified. And that whole thing worked itself out through my music. That's how it got worked out, because I wrote everything whole. I never wrote anything that took more than ten minutes. It would simply move out at some point as I was working through something.

To have that factor in my life and I think that's what I watch, that's why I connect with artists. I see artists working those things through. I see them working it out in the same kind of way and it didn't matter to me whether it was on stage, on a mike, on anything, but the process itself. I feel so grateful for having been able to live all of those pieces fully.

WILMOT: Betty, what you are saying is so rich.

SOSKIN: You hear me. But that's the foundation, that make sense, that's where the sense is for me. It ties all the pieces together and you can call them political or art or whatever you are, but that ties the pieces together. You live long enough and deeply enough to have gone through the whole thing completely. So now what do you with that, what do I do now? And I'm still for some reason waiting for what's the next five years look like, because my experience tells me that it's cyclic, and that I've got to watch for what the next moves are, because they are going to become obvious to me at some point. I'm thinking it's going to be creating now that home for black performing artists. That's where I want itto go. If I can do that--.

WILMOT: I'm sure I'll see it happen. I'll see you do it.

SOSKIN: I hope so. That's where my heart is

WILMOT: Well, on that note, let's close for today.

SOSKIN: Okay, that's good.

WILMOT: Good.