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Dr. Shirley Nash Weber June 30 and July 1, 2008 interviewed by Susan Resnik for San Diego State University 354 minutes of recording PART 1 OF 3 PARTS SUSAN RESNIK: Today is Monday, June 30, 2008. This is Susan Resnik. I’m here in the office of the Department of Special Collections at San Diego State University with Dr. Shirley Nash Weber. We’re about to begin recording her oral history. The oral history project is funded by the San Diego State University Foundation’s John and Jane Adams Humanities Grant. In 1972, at the age of twenty-three, Dr. Shirley Weber became a professor at San Diego State University. She was responsible for shaping the development, and administering the Africana Department, which grew to become one of the strongest Africana Departments in the country. In addition to her involvement at San Diego State, she contributed over the years to the community, and has served as the president of the San Diego Unified School Board. She has won numerous awards for her intellectual achievements and her contributions to society. They include awards from the NAACP, Urban League, Negro Business and Professional Women, California Women in Government, National Council of Black Studies, and the Living Legacy Award, given to her in 1997 by the Women’s International Center as, quote, “a woman who contributes to education, justice, and humanity, having a positive and enduring impact on thousands worldwide.” It’s an honor and a real treat to share this process of doing your oral history. Good morning, Dr. Weber. Dr. Shirley Nash Weber, 6/30 & 7/1/08, Part 1, Draft 1, Page 1 SHIRLEY NASH WEBER: Good morning to you, Susan, as well. SR: I’d like you to start at the beginning. Tell me when and where you were born, and tell me about your parents. SNW: I was born Shirley Ann Nash, to David and Mildred Cooper Nash, in Hope, Arkansas, on September 20, 1948, in Hempstead County, I believe is what it’s called. My parents, David and Mildred, both were born in Arkansas themselves, in Washington, Arkansas, and they, too, in Hempstead County. My parents were farmers, sharecroppers. My mother was a homemaker in my early life. But when I look back on their past, my father’s whole family was raised in Arkansas. His grandfather had been a former slave. I believe they came from Virginia, from that particular area. But my father was from a family of sixteen children. Nine of them lived, and his mother obviously died in childbirth, which was pretty common at that time. His father was a Ware [phonetic] Nash, and his mother was Alabama Nash. I believe his mother came up from Alabama, his father from Virginia. And so it was interesting that my father was from a strong sharecropping family of nine children that lived, five female, four males. It was interesting that all the females, except for one, were born before all the males. There were like four girls, then all the four boys, and then finally the last girl was born. There’s only one surviving aunt that I have on my father’s side, the youngest, a female, who was a schoolteacher in Arkansas. All of my father’s brothers and sisters were raised in Arkansas. They lived almost their entire life in Arkansas, in fact. My grandfather was a very religious man, never conceived of living anywhere other than Arkansas. And in Dr. Shirley Nash Weber, 6/30 & 7/1/08, Part 1, Draft 1, Page 2 fact when my father moved to California, the joke always among the family was, when they would go to church on Sunday morning to Macedonia Church, my grandfather would pray for his son “in a foreign land.” And I asked was someone overseas? And they said, “No, your daddy was in California.” So California was a foreign land to him and his generation that was there. So my father was raised in Arkansas. My mother was also born and raised in Arkansas. And the interesting thing in her life is she was from a very small family—just my mother, her brother, and she had one sister, Elizabeth, who died at childbirth. My father was born in 1918, March 4, 1918; and my mother was born October 1, 1920. My grandmother, who was Birdell—Hood was her maiden name, who became Birdell Cooper and then Birdell Ross—because she was a woman of many, many talents, did not find herself eligible to be living in the country. She wanted to go away. She eventually divorced my grandfather in the early 1920s, which is kind of an unheard of act, by any woman at that particular time. But she was an unusual woman, because her mother, my Great-grandmother Lucy, had been a woman who had been married before, she had several children. And then her husband died, and then she married a second husband named Hood, who was my grandmother’s father. And so my grandmother was the baby of her family. She had lots of brothers and sisters, but they were all older. So when she was born, they were like eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, so she was really like the baby-baby of the family, and as a result never worked in the fields, never did the cotton, didn’t have the hard life that the others had, because her mother was older Dr. Shirley Nash Weber, 6/30 & 7/1/08, Part 1, Draft 1, Page 3 by that time and had remarried. So my grandmother had a different spirit than everybody else, who kind of accepted life in the country, accepted their lot in life. She married my grandfather, who was a very tall, dark man, who had served in World War I. In fact, in 1914 he joined the Army. He was in the infantry of World War I. He loved her dearly, but country life was not for her. He worked on the railroads, but she could not stand the country, so eventually…. She loved to party, she loved the wild life. He didn’t like to party, he was very religious. They separated, she moved to Texarkana, and then she moved to California, which was unheard of—a young woman, on her own, single, coming to California with some friends that she met in Texarkana, Arkansas. Worked at MGM Studios in the cafeteria, and all of my childhood life I heard about Humphrey Bogart and all the other wonderful people that she met at MGM Studios, working in the cafeteria. So she was kind of a different spirit, but that spirit was responsible, eventually, for bringing us to California. My mother, obviously, was raised by her grandmother, because her mother had left, and her grandmother felt California and the wild life was not a place for children, so my great-grandmother raised my mother and her brother in Arkansas. My mother’s first marriage was to a man by the name of Jack McFadden, and I think she also had the spirit of her mother in her, because even though she wanted a family—and she did have a large family, there were eight of us—but she was not one to “take no stuff” in the South. And so my mother and father’s marriage is almost like a love story, because he met my mother early, Dr. Shirley Nash Weber, 6/30 & 7/1/08, Part 1, Draft 1, Page 4 before she got married, at some party, and then he went off to work, because of the Depression, with the CCCs and this group and that group, out in the fields. My mother then married. She married a man who she had two children by, who was very abusive. She had a child in 1939—my oldest sister—and my next sister in 1940. While my mother had a one-year-old and an infant, she quit her husband, was not going to allow this man to abuse her. She quit him, she moved into a one-room kind of situation, and she began to work. And it’s interesting, my father came back in town and discovered that she was single, and, as they say, “took up with her” again. But the interesting thing was, her husband, because he was very domineering, was determined to get her back. So he immediately went to her employer—she worked at a store—and demanded that he fire his wife, that he was destroying his family and his children, and that he should fire her immediately. In those days, 1940, ’41, that’s what the man did, he fired my mother. He fired her so that she could go back to her husband. Well, my father was always a man who took care of his business, so he explained to my mother very honestly, “If it is your desire to go back to your husband, then that’s what I want you to do. But if you do not want to go back to him, money should not be a factor.” And so he took care of my mother. And then he married her, and the six other children were born. And my father basically took care of all eight of us, because he felt as a man that’s your responsibility, to take care of everyone. So he and my mother married in 1941, December 4, 1941, and remained married until her death in 1977. Dr. Shirley Nash Weber, 6/30 & 7/1/08, Part 1, Draft 1, Page 5 It was interesting that my father and mother were quite a unique couple.

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