Knowing what he’d missed out on and wanting better for his children, Nash groomed them to love learning and insisted that they finish high school, which they all did. He thought he would have had more choices.” “Not that he would have been richer or better off. “My father always felt like if he’d had more of an opportunity to go to school, he would have had more choices in life,” Weber said. White farmers would pressure black sharecroppers to pull their sons from school and have them help work the fields, effectively ending their careers as scholars. He could write his name, she recalls, and “read a little.”īlack men of his generation who hailed from Hope rarely advanced to high school, she said. ![]() But having only made it to the 6 th grade back in Arkansas, Weber’s father was semi-literate. Her father David Nash supported his brood with decent wages earned working a union job at a steel mill. Weber’s life as a Californian began at age 3 in South Los Angeles’ Pueblo del Rio housing project, where she and her seven brothers and sisters lived alongside other African American families. “I come out of a legacy that says, if you don’t keep kicking at the door, you’ll never be able to wear it down or open it. “It doesn’t bother me that I’m upsetting people who don’t want to change because they’ve got to change,” Weber said. ![]() Critics consider her a stubborn, impatient, anti-teacher’s union zealot. Often, her proposals stall in the Democratic-controlled Legislature or get vetoed by fellow Democrat Gov. Her solutions include tightening the requirements for teacher tenure and mandating greater fiscal accountability-ideas that make her the rare Democrat at odds with the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest union for educators. California’s achievement gap between poor kids and their wealthier peers hasn’t budged in decades, and the state’s needy fourth graders now rank dead last in math compared to other states. Weber insists that the state “can and must” do a better job teaching low-income students, and has devoted herself to the cause. Toni Atkins, a fellow San Diego Democrat who considers her a mentor. “She doesn’t need this job, and that’s freeing,” said Sen. Shirley Weber at the California Assembly’s most recent swearing-in ceremony. ![]() and become an academic, a school board member and now a legislator, always championing the causes of underdogs. She rose from her hardscrabble roots to earn a Ph.D. Weber inherited that tenacity from him, along with his belief that education is the portal to a better life. She and her cousins swapped stories about shelling peas on her aunt’s screened-in porch, how dark it got at night before the city installed street lights, and what forced her family to flee-her sharecropper father’s refusal to back down during a dispute with a white farmer, and the lynch mob that threatened to take his life. ![]() When Shirley Weber and her siblings fled this place as children in 1951 on a midnight train bound for California, their destination seemed so distant and unfamiliar to the relatives who stayed behind that they called the state a foreign land.Īs Weber stood at the edge of her family’s 100-acre farm on a recent visit, her first in decades, memories of her birthplace came flooding back. After this profile, Weber also led a successful effort in 2019 to change the rules for police shootings, as described in this CalMatters podcast episode. Gavin Newsom, filling the seat vacated by the governor’s appointment of the previous secretary, Alex Padilla, to the US Senate. Editors note: Assemblymember Shirley Weber was nominated to be California Secretary of State on Dec.
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