Photo: Kamala Harris' grandniece, Amara, 8, watches her "auntie" make history. by Todd Heisler, New York Times
When most youngsters are asked what they want to be when they grow up, their answers can range from hysterical to fanciful. Among the varied responses, it is almost guaranteed that there will be, at least, one child who says their aspiration is to become the president of the United States. After watching Kamala Harris speak at the Democratic National Convention this evening (Thursday, August 23, 2024), I wondered what her answer was to that question. When she was a little girl, was she clear about the path that lay in front of her?
Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964, the same year that the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Both of her parents immigrated to the United States.
Her mom, Shyamala Gopalan, was born on December 7, 1938, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India (formerly Madras, Madras Province, British India).She received a Bachelor of Science in home science from Lady Irwin College at the University of Delhi. At 19, she was accepted into the University of California at Berkeley’s nutrition and endocrinology master’s program. She earned her PhD in 1964.
She would go on to conduct research at UC Berkeley’s Department of Zoology and Cancer Research. She was a breast cancer researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She then spent 16 years at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University Faculty of Medicine.
She was a peer reviewer for the National Institutes of Health, a site visit team member for the Federal Advisory Committee, and a member of the President’s Special Commission on Breast Cancer. She also mentored dozens of students. She worked in the Lawrence Berkely National Lab for the last ten years of her career. Because of her breast cancer research, advancements in its study were made. Her career spanned forty years.
Shyamala met Donald Harris, the man who would become her husband, in the fall of 1962 at UC Berkeley. The couple married in 1963. They would have two children, Kamala and her sister Maya, who was born on January 30, 1967, in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The couple divorced in the early1970s. After the dissolution of their marriage, Shyamala and her daughters returned to California. She died of colon cancer on February 11, 2009. Later that year, Kamala returned her mother’s ashes to her birthplace and scattered them in the Indian Ocean.
Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, was born on August 23, 1938,in Brown’s Town, Jamaica. He was raised in Saint Ann Parish. He attended Titchfield High School. He would go on to attend the University College of the West Indies. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of London and his PhD from UC Berkeley. He taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford University. He was the first tenured Black professor in Stanford’s Department of Economics. In 1998, he retired from Stanford.
He published three books—Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution (1978), Jamaica’s Export Economy: Towards a Strategy of Export-led Growth (1997), and A Growth-Inducement Strategy for Jamaica in the Short and Medium Term (2012). He became a naturalized citizen in May 2015 and currently resides in Washington DC.
Kamala is the daughter of immigrants who went on to become highly valuable in their chosen fields of study. In addition to her parents, friends of her mother’s, who were African American intellectuals and civil rights activists, helped raise her and her sister and deeply influenced them.
Shyamala, Kamala, and Maya would eventually move to Montreal, Quebec, where Shyamala had accepted a research position at the McGill University School of Medicine. Kamala graduated from Westmount High School in1981. She attended Vanier College from 1981-82. Then, she transferred to Howard University (an HBCU). She majored in political science and economics and graduated in 1986. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree, Kamala enrolled in the University of California, Hasting College of the Law. She served as president of her school’s Black Law Students Association. In 1989, she graduated with a juris doctor. At the start of the nineties, Kamala’s career as an attorney would begin to take shape. We will explore her career in the second part of this three-part series about Kamala Harris, our current vice president and the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee.
