Kamala Devi Harris US Vice President will be running for the US President as the Democratic candidate as President Joesph Biden announced that he will not be running.
On January 20, 2021, Kamala Harris was sworn in as Vice President – the first woman, the first person of Indian and African decent to be elected to this position.
As Vice President, she has worked to bring people together to advance opportunity, deliver for families, and protect fundamental freedoms across the country. She has led the fight for the freedom of women to make decisions about their own bodies, the freedom to live safe from gun violence, the freedom to vote, and the freedom to drink clean water and breathe clean air. While making history at home, she is also representing the nation abroad – embarking on more than a dozen foreign trips, traveling to more than 19 countries, and meeting with more than 150 world leaders to strengthen critical global alliances.
She always fights for the people – from her barrier-breaking time as District Attorney of San Francisco and Attorney General of California, to proudly serving as a United States Senator and the Vice President.
She was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a Tamil Indian biologist whose work on the progesterone receptor gene stimulated advances in breast cancer research. She moved to the United States from India as a 19-year-old graduate student in 1958, after studying home science at Lady Irwin College in New Delhi. After studying nutrition and endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley she received her PhD in 1964.
Her father, Donald J. Harris, is Jamaican American of Afro-Jamaican ancestry. He is a Stanford University professor of economics (emeritus) who arrived in the United States from British Jamaica in 1961, for graduate study at UC Berkeley, receiving a PhD in economics in 1966. Donald Harris met his future wife Shyamala Gopalan at a college club for African-American students (though Indian American, Shyamala was allowed to join).
Harris’s childhood home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley
In 1966, the Harris family moved to Champaign, Illinois (where Kamala’s younger sister Maya was born) when her parents took positions at the University of Illinois. The family moved around the Midwest, with both parents working at multiple universities in succession over a brief period. Kamala, along with her mother and sister, moved back to California in 1970, while her father remained in the Midwest.
They stayed briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then at a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called the “flatlands” with a significant black population. When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley’s comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent black.
Her parents divorced when she was seven. Harris has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, other children in the neighborhood were not allowed to play with them because they were black. A neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children’s choir, and the girls and their mother also frequently visited a nearby African American cultural center.
Their mother introduced them to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where Shyamala occasionally sang. As children, she and her sister visited their mother’s family in Madras (now Chennai) several times. She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. V. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women’s rights impressed her. Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life. Harris has also visited her father’s family in Jamaica.
When she was twelve, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Quebec, where Shyamala had accepted a research and teaching position at the McGill University-affiliated Jewish General Hospital. Harris attended a French-speaking primary school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, then F.A.C.E. School, and finally Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.
Wanda Kagan, a high school friend of Harris, later told CBC News in 2020 that Harris was her best friend and described how she confided in Harris that she (Kagan) had been molested by her stepfather.[43] She said that Harris told her mother, who then insisted Kagan come to live with them for the remainder of her final year of high school. Kagan said Harris had recently told her that their friendship, and playing a role in countering Kagan’s exploitation, helped form the commitment Harris felt in protecting women and children as a prosecutor.
After high school, Harris attended Vanier College in Montreal in 1981–1982. She then attended Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. While at Howard, she interned as a mailroom clerk for California senator Alan Cranston, chaired the economics society, led the debate team, and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Harris graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics. She then returned to California to attend the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (now University of California College of the Law, San Francisco) through its Legal Education Opportunity Program (LEOP). While at UC Hastings, she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989 and was admitted to the California Bar in June 1990.