San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Shirley Weber, candidate for the California Assembly
“Even doubtful accusations leave a stain behind them.”
—Thomas Fuller
The gloves have come off early in the state 79th Assembly District race.
It began recently when longtime community activist Robert Robinson, a household name for his good works in Broadway Heights, sent out an email questioning the leadership qualities of former San Diego school board member Shirley Weber, the most familiar name in a growing field seeking the newly shaped 79th District seat.
Recent redistricting not only created a new political landscape there; it also renumbered it from the old 78th Assembly District, a seat now held by Marty Block, who’s announced his plans to run for the state Senate. The new 79th is a serpentine district, winding through Linda Vista and Mission Valley and some of San Diego’s poorest southeastern neighborhoods while gobbling up La Mesa and Lemon Grove and heading south into more affluent South Bay neighborhoods like Eastlake.
Robinson, who’s lived in Broadway Heights since 1980, said he’s merely contributing to the vetting process that every candidate seeking office must go through.
His email, with the subject line “Breaking News on the 79th,” states that this is the “starting report card on the 79th.” It includes a photo of Weber next to a quote in bold letters declaring, “We can’t Trust this type of Leadership.”
Another picture included in the email is a famous one from the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers march—just days before Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination— showing men holding signs that proclaim, “I AM A MAN.”
A news clipping from 1993 then follows, with the headline “Minority protesters halt project demand jobs.”
It is indeed a Union-Tribune article that ran in early October of that year. Robinson remembers it well, seeing that he was one of the 80 or so protesters objecting to the hiring practices of local contractors for various construction jobs—in this case, the lack of African-Americans working on the then-new Nye Elementary School in Valencia Park.
“I was there with my daughter, who was in the sixth grade at the time,” Robinson recalled. “She was on that line getting a civics lesson.”
The action, led then by the late City Councilmember George Stevens, was described in the article as “a return to the confrontational style of the 1960s.” Protesters, the article said, “blocked a bulldozer and a diesel truck carrying lumber and halted the work of several laborers in trenches and on building foundations.”
Work was stopped for that day, and Stevens vowed to return to continue the work disruption the next day unless the contractor agreed to boost hiring of blacks for the $5.8 million project to “at least” 25 percent of the workforce.
By the end of the first day, the protesters met with school-board members, including Weber, who at the time was board president, Robinson said. Those officials, he recalled, “said they wanted to see what we could do to try to work it out.”
But the following morning, when protesters gathered at the site to continue protesting, they were met by several dozen San Diego police officers who threatened them with jail if they trespassed on the school site, Robinson said.
“They said they would lock us up,” he added. “We were totally unaware of that.”
Robinson said school-board members must have “decided to have some police officers confront us.”
Asked if he blamed Weber for the threat of police action, Robinson shot back, “I’m not accusing her of anything.
What I’m merely saying is, on her watch this occurred.
“The whole thing behind this email is to ask people, ‘Do you want leadership to talk to you in one vein in a meeting, and the next day something else occurs? Can you trust that type of leadership?” Weber said she’s baffled by the present significance of an incident that occurred nearly 18 years ago. “This was at a time,” she said, “when there was lots of activity among the black contractors at various sites, not just city schools, to raise the issue of employment in the construction industry.”
Regarding low employment for blacks at the Nye construction site, Weber said that information “was news to us. No one had brought it to our attention. But we responded to it immediately. Nielsen Construction responded to it. And that ended it.”
That’s clearly not the case for Robinson, whose voice still soars when he talks about it nearly two decades later. “We met with the construction company,” he said of the protesters. “They said they had 13 people ready to go to work. We just burst after that. But this was resolved not because of the school district, but because of us protesting.”
In a follow-up story to the 1993 protest just days later, the Union-Tribune quoted Weber as saying, “There is no question that Nielsen did not have adequate representation of African- Americans. The protesters had a legitimate concern….”
Now, it’s clear that those endeared to the fire-and-brimstone-style of the Rev. Stevens remember that Weber and Stevens were frequent political rivals. She now boasts the endorsements of Congressmember and mayoral candidate Bob Filner, City Council President Tony Young and Assemblymember Toni Atkins.
But even a key organizer of the 1993 protest, Abdur-Rahim Hameed, president of the National Black Contractors Association, wrote Weber this week to denounce Robinson’s email.
“Robert is presenting this as though it’s happening now, and everyone knows that the late George Stevens is no longer with us, who would back you for the 79th if he was alive,” Hameed wrote. “The work you did then, in holding off the school police to allow our 1st Amendment right and thereafter putting African-Americans on the job, will never be forgotten.”
Weber, meanwhile, understands the political game.
“There may be other things coming out. I do have a political record, after all,” she reasoned. “But I’m not a wallflower. I’m a fighter. And I believe I’m in this world to make a difference.”
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