San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Secretary of state ready to referee recall battle
California Secretary of State Shirley Weber will soon become a national figure as the referee at the center of the expected recall election of Gov. Gavin Newsom — a slugfest that nobody wants to officiate.
It will be her job to do everything from certifying there are enough valid signatures on the recall petitions to administering the election.
No matter what she does, Weber will become a controversial figure to some in this era of crying about nonexistent election fraud. Just about every secretary of state does these days.
But if that happens, Weber won’t back down.
Not much scares her after what her family has lived through.
The 72yearold Democrat grew up in rural Hope, Ark., the daughter of a sharecropper who was chased out of town by a lynch mob when she was a little girl. As she explained on my “It’s All Political” podcast, Black sharecroppers would learn at the end of the season whether they had made enough money to get out of debt.
“Well, as usual, you always come up short because that’s the nature of the monster,” Weber said. Landowners would invent a reason that the sharecropper remained in debt “in order to keep you in bondage. And it also binds you and your children and your children’s children, pretty much like a modern day slavery system.”
In 1951, there was a disagreement about what her father, David Nash, owed the white landowner.
“My father was always very proud. He never said, ‘Yes, sir. No, sir,’ to anybody, and he knew they were cheating him,” Weber said.
There was a “physical confrontation,” she said, and word got out that “my dad had become a liability ... and as a result needed to be eliminated. So they were going to make an example of him.”
So Weber’s grandfather and uncles whisked her father out of town in the middle of the night. Soon he was on a train to Los Angeles, where he had family.
For weeks afterward, the white men who were looking for him would come by the tworoom shack with no indoor plumbing where Weber remained with her mother and five siblings. Soon, the rest of the family also left in the middle of the night to join Weber’s father in California, where they lived in housing projects before he could save enough to buy a home.
But Weber’s father didn’t live in exile in California. Every four years, he would take the family back home to Hope so his children would know their cousins and aunts and uncles.
More important, Weber said, “so they could see that he was not afraid.”
“He was not gonna back down,” she said. In the Jim Crow South, “we never ate in the back of a restaurant. My dad would not pay for food in the front and walk to the back . ... He wouldn’t go to outdoor toilets on the road when they had regular restrooms.
“He was very, very clear about who we were,” she said.
Weber thinks about her father’s bravery whenever she’s threatened politically.
“My dad, he should have been afraid, but he was not. And so if he could not be afraid ... and his life being in peril, what the hell am I afraid of ?” Weber said. “What can they do? Not invite me to lunch?”
Weber said her father was semiliterate, not having made it past the fifth grade. He urged his children to embrace education so they wouldn’t face the obstacles he did. She did, earning her bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from UCLA by age 26. She went on to teach for nearly four decades, most of that time at San Diego State University.
In 1998, she began her political career by serving on the San Diego school board. Recruited by a fellow San Diego resident, nowstate Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, she was elected to the Assembly in 2012.
But she didn’t act like most Democrats in Sacramento, particularly in how she bucked California’s powerful teachers union.
In 2015, she proposed a bill that would have required teachers to be evaluated in part by their students’ academic performance. When Democrats buried it in committee, she called out her fellow Education Committee members.
“When I see what’s going on, I’m offended, as a senior member of this committee, who has probably more educational background and experience than all y’all put together on top of each other,” Weber said. Nor has Weber been shy about taking on law enforcement. She was a driving force behind a 2019 law that raised the legal standard for police to justify using deadly force.
But last year another issue close to Weber’s heart — affirmative action — was defeated at the polls. She encouraged the Legislature to put on the ballot Proposition 16, which would have reinstated affirmative action in public university admissions and government hiring and contracting. Initially, the measure seemed like it would benefit from the wave of public support for a racial justice movement after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. But voters soundly defeated it.
Analysts have offered all sorts of reasons for the measure’s demise, from confusing ballot language to the pandemic decreasing proponents’ ability to campaign for it in person.
But Weber offered another analysis. She contrasted it with Proposition 17, which allowed people on parole for a felony conviction to vote. Voters approved the measure overwhelmingly.
“That didn’t cost anybody anything. You didn’t have to give up your vote in order to give them a vote,” Weber said. When it came to reinstating affirmative action, however, “people realized that it was really going to reorder some things in America.”
When people were confronted with “a choice between their son going to UCLA and your son going to UCLA, are they big enough and willing enough to make that sacrifice? Because it’s a limited number of resources,” Weber said. “And there are very few liberals who are going to give up much of what they have for you. They will expand the franchise, but will they give up their seat?”
Weber, whom Newsom named this year to replace nowSen. Alex Padilla, plans to run for the job in 2022. Throughout her life, she has bristled when people congratulated her for “breaking the glass ceiling” — in this case, being California’s first Black secretary of state.
“For Black people, it’s a steel ceiling,” Weber said. For those who live in a world with a glass ceiling, she said, “you have the capacity to look up and see who’s in the other room ... to see what they’re doing and even to mimic their behavior. A steel ceiling, you don’t even know if there is another floor. You hope there is. You may think that you’re at the second floor, when really you’re at floor one. And there are five floors above you.”