For more than two decades in public life, Kamala Harris has achieved a lot of firsts: the first Black woman to serve as San Francisco’s district attorney, the first woman to be California’s attorney general, the first Indian American senator, and the first woman vice president of the U.S., working by President Joe Biden’s side.
On Sunday, Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 presidential election and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The news followed weeks of mounting pressure for the president to step down, due to concerns and skepticism about his health and ability to govern the country for another four years.
If Kamala Harris becomes the Democratic nominee and defeats Republican candidate Donald Trump in November, she would not only be the first woman to serve as president but also the first Black woman and first person of South Asian descent to be president thanks to her roots.
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Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964, to Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher born in southern India, and Donald Harris, an economist born in Jamaica. Her motto comes from her mom: “You may be the first, but make sure you’re not the last.”
Here’s what you should know about how Kamala Harris’ mom Gopalan and dad Donald Harris met and fell in love.
Gopalan and Donald Harris met when they both moved to the U.S. for their graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The two became part of a Black intellectual study group that held talks about the experiences of Africans and African Americans. Their friendship blossomed while members of the group, Donald Harris told The New York Times.
“We talked then, continued to talk at a subsequent meeting, and at another, and another,” Donald Harris said of how he started a relationship with Gopalan in 1962.
Being a gifted student, Gopalan was just 19 when she earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi, and with her love for science and the support of her parents, she traveled from India to the U.S. to further her studies at Berkeley.
She went on to earn a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in nutrition and endocrinology at 25 years old. In her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” Kamala Harris writes that her mother was expected to go back to India after she had completed her studies at Berkeley. Her parents had arranged a marriage for her.
“But fate had other plans. She and my father met and fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement,” Vice President Kamala Harris writes. “Her marriage — and her decision to stay in the United States — were the ultimate acts of self determination and love.”
Gopalan and Donald Harris went on to marry in 1963 and had two daughters — Kamala Harris and Maya. When Kamala Harris was born, her parents, who were still active in the civil rights movement, often took her along to protests in a stroller.
Soon, her parents’ marriage was on the rocks. “In time, things got harder. They stopped being kind to each other,” Kamala Harris writes. “I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water.”
“By the time I was 5 years old, the bond between them had given way under the weight of incompatibility,” she recounts.
Kamala Harris’ parents divorced not too long after their marriage and even though her father remained “a part of our lives”, Kamala Harris writes that “it was really my mother who took charge of our upbringing. She was the one most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.”
Kamala Harris grew up embracing both her Black and South Asian identities, and one time visited India while young, where it is documented that she “was heavily influenced by her grandfather, a high-ranking government official who fought for Indian independence, and grandmother, an activist who traveled the countryside teaching impoverished women about birth control.”
Donald Harris also recently recalled Kamala Harris visiting Orange Hill, Jamaica, in 1970, where he had an amazing time with her and the family.
“We trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, up-hill and down-hill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy,” he stated in an essay for Jamaica Global in 2019.
But things turned sour owing to his divorce and custody battle. “This early phase of interaction with my children came to an abrupt halt in 1972 when, after a hard-fought custody battle in the family court of Oakland, California, the context of the relationship was placed within arbitrary limits imposed by a court-ordered divorce settlement based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting,” he said.
Still, Donald Harris, who is now a professor emeritus, never gave up on his responsibilities as a father and would help shape Kamala Harris to be who she is today.
Gopalan also received several honors for her work as a research scientist before she passed away from cancer at age 70 in 2009.
“My mother, Shyamala Gopalan, had two goals in her life: to raise her two daughters and end breast cancer,” Kamala Harris wrote in May. “I’m grateful for her raising me to see what could be, unburdened by what has been.”
