Shirley Weber ’70, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’75

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UCLA honors Shirley Nash Weber ’70, M.A. ’71, Ph.D. ’75, with the inaugural 2024 UCLA Award for Inclusive Excellence. A change agent and advocate, she has dedicated her career to expanding democratic participation, access and equity.

Dr. Weber was nominated to serve as California Secretary of State by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2021, and elected for a full term on Nov. 8, 2022. Weber is California’s first Black Secretary of State and only the fifth African American to serve as a California constitutional officer.

Born to sharecroppers in Hope, Arkansas, during the Jim Crow era, her family history has been a driving force in her activism and legislative work. Her family left Arkansas for California when she was three, after a lynch mob threatened her father. Her father did not vote until he was 30 and her grandfather died before passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. She has fought to secure and expand civil rights for all Californians.

Weber is a triple Bruin with bachelor's, master’s and doctorate degrees in communication from UCLA. While still in school, she became a professor of Africana Studies at San Diego State University at the age of 23. She went on to teach at San Diego State for 40 years, where she founded the department of Africana studies and served several terms as department chair. She has been a member and chair of the San Diego Unified School District and has twice served as a California elector.

Weber served four terms as an assemblymember representing California's 79th Assembly District in the San Diego region, where she was a champion of equity-oriented legislation in areas including school finance and accountability, quality instruction, law enforcement’s use-of-force, reparations, predatory lending, restorative justice, and health policy impacting senior citizens and veterans.

During her tenure in the Assembly, she became the first African American to serve as the chair of the Assembly Budget Committee and chaired the Assembly Elections and Redistricting Committee. She also served as a member of the Standing Committees on Education, Higher Education, Elections, Budget, Banking and Finance. She chaired the Select Committee on Campus Climate, to mitigate hate crimes on California’s college and university campuses. She created and chaired the Select Committee on Higher Education in San Diego County, to improve the quality, affordability and access of higher education. She served as chair of the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC), promoting equal opportunity for California’s African American community.

In 2024, the Los Angeles City Council declared Feb. 14 “Shirley N. Weber Day” in honor of the first Black secretary of state in California’s history. Weber has made an indelible impact — at UCLA and across California — through her lifelong commitment to service as a champion of equity.