Erudite grassroots oral historian and the oldest park ranger in America, nonagenarian African American folk hero Betty Reid Soskin has finally gotten the recognition she deserves in this documentary about her long and productive life, which has spanned ten decades now. Although this film sports the usual parade of gushy talking heads, it’s really the footage of Soskin herself that’s most compelling, as she holds court at California’s Rosie the Riveter/Richmond National Park Museum and educates auditoriums full of historically curious youngsters. As a historian, Soskin shoots from the hip, which usually means venturing into America’s fraught history of race relations and the realities of racial prejudice and discrimination that often get ignored by mainstream textbook histories of 20th century US history. As we learn in the film, Soskin has a deep connection to the history of racial injustice in America: her great-grandmother was born into slavery in the mid-18th century and was eventually freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation when she was 19 years old.
Soskin herself was, as she puts it, a “child of the service generation,” in which most African Americans could only hope to have menial jobs that were in direct service to whites. But Soskin herself managed to find a file clerk’s job during World War II at the Boilermakers’ Union, which was itself the product of Jim Crow America, but for her, it was a step up from the fate of most women of color at the time: caretaking, cooking, and cleaning for white folks. The film perfectly culminates in Soskin being invited to the Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony at the White House in 2015, where she would have a momentous meeting with US President, Barack Obama, who would pay public tribute to her valuable national service as a historian/park ranger. Not long after she was subjected to a brutal home invasion in which she was badly hurt and had some of her favorite memorabilia stolen: yet two weeks later, she was back on duty as a park ranger. No Time to Waste is an apt tribute to a modern-day civil rights icon now finally getting her fair due albeit in the twilight of her life. Recommended. Aud: C, P.