The Forum at Grace Cathedral: Betty Reid Soskin

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us for an exclusive sneak peek of a 20-minute work sample of “Sign My Name to Freedom,” a feature documentary about iconic National Park Ranger Betty Reid Soskin, her hidden life as a singer-songwriter, and her family’s experiences confronting Jim Crow-style segregation on the West Coast.  

Betty gained fame as the oldest Park Ranger in the country after starting that job at the age of 85, and she continued working at the Rosie the Riveter National Historic Site as an interpretive oral historian until she retired at 100. Through her experience as a WWII file clerk for an all-black union auxiliary in Richmond, she helped to reshape the national narrative about home front segregation in the workplace, labor unions, and in the armed forces.  

 The documentary takes Betty’s work for the Park Service as its jumping off point, and then it explores lesser-known aspects of her personal story, focusing in large part on her family’s role as the first African Americans to cross the color line into Walnut Creek, and her hidden life as a singer/songwriter in the years that followed. The film also looks at Betty’s journey in her 90s to reexplore the music she left behind fifty years earlier and her collaborations with younger musicians to give her songs life again. 

Following the 20-minute preview of the documentary, join Malcolm Clemens Young for a conversation with Director and Producer Bryan Gibel and Betty’s daughter Di’ara Reid about the making of the film, and about Betty Reid Soskin, an icon in the Bay Area and beyond. 

The film team is currently raising funds through a crowdfunding campaign to complete the documentary while Betty is still with us to experience it, which she very much hopes can happen. Their goal is to finish the project by the end of this year. Although Betty is doing well at 102, the clock is ticking given her advanced age. The campaign will run through mid-March, but if the team doesn’t hit their fundraising goal by then, none of the donation pledges they have secured will be processed.

Support the making of the documentary  

Documentary Trailer 

Read Betty Reid Soskin’s Memoir  

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The Forum will be posted on our Youtube and Apple Podcast channels.   

About the Guest

Bryan Gibel is a director, producer, and cinematographer in Oakland, CA. He shoots, directs, and often edits his own projects, which range from investigations into the criminal justice system to visual experiments capturing movement and dance. His half-hour film of the Zaccho Dance Theatre project at Grace Cathedral, Love, A State of Grace, premiered at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival in October 2023. Originally from New Mexico, he worked as a bilingual reporter in Albuquerque before earning a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism documentary film program in 2012, where he was awarded the Mark Felt Fellowship for Investigative Reporting.

Di’ara Melite Kitty Reid is Betty Reid Soskin’s eldest daughter, and proud parent of four children. She was Betty’s successor to Reid’s Records, California’s first black-owned record store established in 1945, for 30 years till doors closed October of 2019. Since then, Di’ara served on the board of the San Francisco PRIDE Parade from 2022-2023, and is currently a Youth Counselor to trans and non-binary youth at The Pacific Center of Human Growth, the oldest LGBTQIA+ center in the Bay Area, the third oldest in the nation. She is one of the main characters of Sign My Name to Freedom and has been involved with the film from the very beginning.

About the Moderator

The Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young is the dean of Grace Cathedral. He is the author of The Spiritual Journal of Henry David Thoreau and The Invisible Hand in Wilderness: Economics, Ecology, and God, and is a regular contributor on religion to the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner.    

About The Forum

The Forum is a series of stimulating conversations about faith and ethics in relation to the important issues of our day. We invite inspiring and illustrious people to sit down for a real conversation with the Forum’s host and with you. Our guests range from artists, inventors, and philosophers to pop culturists and elected officials, but the point of The Forum is singular: civil, sophisticated discourse that engages minds and hearts to think in new ways about the world.  More about Grace Forum Online.

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