The Honorable Madam Secretary

Shirley Weber ’70, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’75 was born in Hope, Arkansas, the birthplace of another famed politician — though her path into politics was by no means as direct.

The daughter of a sharecropper, Weber was only 3 when her family fled to Los Angeles after her father was threatened by a white lynch mob. The family landed in the Pueblo del Rio housing projects in South L.A., where Weber was instilled with the belief that education was vital to succeed in a country that often discounted people who looked like her. Weber took this message to heart as she traveled back and forth from her neighborhood in South L.A. to Westwood. She graduated from UCLA with three degrees: a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D., all in communication.

Inspired by a UCLA professor to pursue her love of history, she went on to found the Department of Africana Studies at San Diego State University, where she taught for more than 40 years. But it was in politics that she would find her next calling, rising from a member of the California State Assembly to her present role as California secretary of state, an office she assumed in January 2021. In this role, Weber has proven to be as tough, sharp, incisive and compassionate as she has always been, at a time when — with voting rights under attack, and the country deeply polarized — secretaries of state are now being thrust into the spotlight. Their charge: nothing less than protecting our democracy.

You earned three degrees as a Bruin. What kept you coming back to UCLA?

It was a culture you could kind of fit into your own world. And more Black students started coming, and as a result we got curriculum and activities that were a lot more related to us. California invested in us. We were getting the best education in the world, because the University of California was giving it to us. You were on the cutting edge of everything, whether it was environmental issues or whatever. You could just go outside of the campus and see exactly what the world was talking about.

You’ve talked about your family and their expectations for you.

My father was a sharecropper. He came to California because the Klan was going to kill him because he stood up for himself. So he got on a wagon to California, where my grandmother was, and then, three, four months later, he earned enough money to bring the rest of us out. There were six of us at the time, six kids, and then eventually two more.

Obviously, your family stressed education.

He would have sold his house if I needed [that to be able] to go to UCLA. That was my father. And so I knew that there was this tremendous amount of support, even though my parents were never pressing me. My ma was like, “You do as best you can. All we ask you to do is try, you do the best, and don’t just squander things away.”

How did your personal history shape your understanding of the country as you entered politics?

You know, it’s a really bizarre situation. I never wanted to be an elected official. I’ve never volunteered to run for anything. I’ve been pushed into all kinds of positions. People are now trying to push me to run for governor, and some of them are candidates themselves. But you know this has not been the definition of what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be a teacher, an educator. I didn’t see myself as a politician, and never have. I was taught as a kid that you don’t want to be a politician; you want to be a statesman. You want to be a person who fights despite the odds, and that you have values about what you do, that people can count on you.

Which for you all started when you were recruited to run for your local school board.

I realized the community needed me at that moment. I did it for two terms, and then I went back to the university and finished this stuff I was doing. I had just retired from the university in 2010 when I got a call from Toni Atkins, who was the [California Assembly] majority leader, who was going to become the speaker of the house, and she wanted me to run for the Assembly. And I said, “You gotta be kidding.” This was when California was in financial crisis, and they were doing some things that I knew were not beneficial for kids in California, that they were dumbing down the curriculum. They were going to limit the requirements for students, try to make it quick and cheap for people to go to school. And I just knew it was wrong, and the faculty was complaining about it, and everybody else was. And so I went downstairs and called Toni Atkins back and said, “Okay, I’m going to have to run for the Assembly.” There has to be a voice in the Assembly about education.

And that eventually led to your current role.

Then the governor called me and asked me if I’d be secretary of state. I have fought a lot of social justice issues, issues about voting, making sure that ex-offenders could vote, making sure that those on parole could vote, putting Prop 17 on the ballot, making sure that our people go in the jails and allow people to vote, making it possible for our nonprofit groups to do that. So I had done a lot of that work, as well as some of the other issues in terms of the police force and use of force. And then the ethnic studies bill and reparations. So I had done the work, and I think I did that because when you get to a certain point in your life, and you have done a lot of things, there’s nothing to be afraid of. The only thing left is death. At my age, I don’t care if people don’t like me.

But you’ve been successful. Obviously, people like you.

I had a cadre of people organize for me.The people discovered that “This woman is kind of courageous. You know that she will stand up.” Which is what I’ve been taught all my life, to stand up and to be counted — you know, to fight for those things, to open your mouth and be the voice for the voiceless.

We are in a national moment where secretaries of state are front and center due to the attacks on voting rights across the country. Talk about that.

I firmly believe that voting was something that Black people fought for. They fought for education and voting — those two things my dad told me over and over. You get an education so you can take care of yourself and do these things, and you vote because you have to determine who’s going to basically give you an opportunity to do what you need to do. If you can’t vote, then people can take your money, your land and everything else. So I had that kind of ingrained in me. My parents didn’t vote until they were in their 30s, because they couldn’t vote in Arkansas. So I knew how powerful voting was, and when I saw what was happening across the nation with all the voter suppression laws, what was happening in 2020, when I was offered to be secretary of state I said, “Who else but a kid whose parents were in the Jim Crow South, and whose grandparents never got a chance to vote?” I took the challenge because I knew that I would stand up for it. That I would not be afraid.

How would you describe what you do to someone who is unfamiliar with the role of a secretary of state?

You’re responsible for making sure that everybody’s votes count. Recently people have realized that you get the wrong person in here, you could have chaos. As I tell young people, “I’m responsible for all of y’all. You know everybody that votes. Everybody who walks into a poll. Everybody who registers. I am technically responsible for all of you, and responsible to you.” To make sure that this system works. Without us, democracy would be in peril.

Speaking of young people, that’s the largest demographic of nonvoters in California. If you could gather all 18- to 25-year-olds in a room who are nonvoters, what would you say to them?

I’d try first to help them understand the history behind why our parents and folks wanted us to vote, the power of it in a democracy. You know, it’s like 10 people sitting in this room. If you choose not to vote, then you have empowered me above you, because now your vote is not 10 percent. And you keep whittling it down, and you soon discover that you have empowered other people who don’t even like you.

Two other issues I wanted to get your thoughts on — the first being proposed bills to ban AP African American studies in Texas and Florida.

It’s once again the old example of people changing the rules when they want the rules to fit them. Prior to this time, nobody questioned the AP. Nobody questioned the college board, the folks at Princeton. These are smart people who know how to write curriculum, who know what kids need to know, who know how to test them. Now we got a group of people who barely went to school themselves who are going to decide that they need to strip certain things out of the AP, if it is to exist at all. You’re going to take Black Lives Matter out of an AP course? It’s history, whether you like it or not. But you want to rewrite the history to make you look better, and it brings up all of that stuff that teaches us that if you want to control people, you control what they read, you control what they know.

How serious is this?

It is the most insidious thing that can happen to a group of people, is to have somebody redo their history. It is an insult to Black people, and anybody should be as insulted as anybody else, because if they do it to us, they’ll do it to somebody else later on. So this governor in Florida, and all those who have no knowledge of what they’re talking about, are taking scholars from the best institutions in the world and going to tell them what they can teach. It’s ridiculous. And those of us in the academy should be outraged by this, outraged, because it’s just the beginning. This is the nose under the tent, and pretty soon they will destroy the tent. It’s quite sad, because I don’t think people understand just how difficult it is to constantly combat 400 years of racism and discrimination.

Talk about reparations, which you wrote a bill on.

People are owed something for the kind of horror that they’ve experienced. And we, as a state and a nation, recognize that other people have had horrors, and as a result we compensate them for that. And yet with African Americans, there’s no thought whatsoever that there has been damage done to us. Even those of us who’ve been successful recognize that it has been at the expense of a whole lot of other things, and that probably we would have been successful sooner, or even more successful. So as a result, there’s no effort to talk about compensation for the damage done, there’s no sorrow about the damage done. All the other kids in my neighborhood who were equally smart are not doing what I’m doing. It’s not that I’m so bright and brilliant and smart. I just had some folks who recognized me at some point, and helped me. There are a whole lot of other people who didn’t get through. It’s tragic.

With all of this, a lot of people are feeling hopeless. What are you hopeful about?

I’m always optimistic that those of us who have benefited the most from whatever’s been given to us, that we will fight. You know that we will fight. That we will recognize what has been given to us, and our responsibility to protect it. And I’m optimistic that California will teach these folks that rather than running from your diversity, you run to it. That’s what makes you strong. You know, people talk about California and our diversity, but we are the fifth — going to become the fourth — largest economy in the world, and that’s because we acknowledge our diversity. We’re working with our Native Americans, we’re trying to do reparations. California is going to lead in this area, and we have to. So I’m optimistic as I see the stuff we do, the legislation that I’ve done that people said couldn’t get done, the things that took place, and we’re continuing to push that agenda. We will do even greater things. The rest of the world continues to look to us, to see what California is doing.

Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Summer 2023 issue.