Kamala Devi Harris

Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a twenty-five-year-old biochemist and cancer researcher from Chennai, India, on a doctoral program at UC Berkeley. Her father, Donald J. Harris, was a Jamaican-born economist, also at Berkeley, later the first Black scholar granted tenure in Stanford's economics department. The two met through the Afro-American Association, a civil rights study group led by Donald Warden, in the early 1960s Berkeley movement.

Her parents separated when she was five and divorced when she was seven. Her mother raised her and her younger sister Maya. Shyamala took her daughters to the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center in Berkeley where James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, and Maya Angelou spoke. She enrolled them at Thousand Oaks Elementary School, part of the second class of children bused under Berkeley's voluntary desegregation plan. She took them to 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland on Sundays and to the Hindu temple when the family could find one.

In 1976, when she was twelve, her mother accepted a research position at McGill University. The family moved to Montreal. Kamala attended Westmount High School and graduated in 1981. She applied to Howard University because Thurgood Marshall had gone there, because Toni Morrison had taught there, and because she wanted to study inside a Black institution for her undergraduate years. She enrolled in the fall of 1982, majored in political science and economics, and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first Black sorority in America, founded at Howard in 1908.

She graduated in 1986 and returned to California to attend UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She received her JD in 1989. She passed the California bar in 1990 and joined the Alameda County District Attorney's Office as a line prosecutor in the sex crimes unit. She spent the 1990s in that office and then in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, trying cases and building a reputation as a courtroom operator.

In 2003, she challenged her former boss, San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, in the Democratic primary. She was thirty-nine. She had never held elected office. She won the runoff in December 2003 with fifty-six percent of the vote. She was sworn in on January 8, 2004, as the first Black woman elected district attorney in California history. She served two terms. She created the Back on Track reentry program for first-time low-level offenders, which was later adopted by the California legislature as a model statute.

In 2010, she ran for California Attorney General. The race against Republican Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County DA, was decided by fewer than one percent of the vote and was not called for three weeks. She won. She was sworn in on January 3, 2011, as the first Black woman, the first South Asian American, and the first woman of any background to serve as attorney general of the most populous state in the country.

Her signature work as AG came in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis. California had been one of the states hit hardest by foreclosures. Banks had offered all fifty state attorneys general a settlement worth around four billion dollars to California. Harris walked away from the table in September 2011. She filed suit against the major servicers, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. She returned to the negotiating table, and in February 2012, she announced a settlement worth roughly twenty-five billion dollars to California borrowers, principal reductions and refinancings that reached two hundred thousand households.

She won reelection in 2014 and, when Senator Barbara Boxer announced her retirement in 2015, Harris declared for the open seat. She won the 2016 primary and the general election with sixty-two percent of the vote. She was sworn in to the U.S. Senate on January 3, 2017, one of two Black women ever to serve in that body at the same time, the other being Carol Moseley Braun's successor in spirit, her new colleague Cory Booker's ally on the Judiciary Committee.

Her three and a half years in the Senate were defined by Judiciary Committee questioning. Her June 2017 examination of Attorney General Jeff Sessions produced the line from him that he could not answer because he was getting nervous. Her September 2018 questioning of Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing asked whether he could name any law that gave the government power over a man's body. Her October 2020 questioning of Amy Coney Barrett pressed her on climate change as a scientific consensus. Those transcripts are now taught in law school as models of direct examination.

On August 11, 2020, Joe Biden named her as his running mate. On November 7, 2020, the networks called the race. She delivered her victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware, four days later, in a white pantsuit chosen in honor of the suffragists. She said she stood on the shoulders of generations of women who fought, and she named her mother. She was sworn in as the 49th Vice President of the United States on January 20, 2021, by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, using a Bible that had belonged to Thurgood Marshall.

In four years as Vice President she cast thirty-three tie-breaking votes in the Senate, the most of any Vice President in American history, surpassing John C. Calhoun's record set in the 1820s. She led the administration's voting-rights advocacy, its response to the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, and its diplomatic work with Central America and Southeast Asia. She traveled to the Korean Demilitarized Zone, to the Munich Security Conference, and to twenty-one countries on official state business.

On July 21, 2024, President Biden withdrew from the race and endorsed her the same day. She secured the Democratic nomination within forty-eight hours with the support of a majority of delegates. Her one hundred seven day general-election campaign raised more than one billion dollars, a record for that compressed timeline. She lost the election on November 5, 2024. On January 20, 2025, she presided over the certification of the Electoral College count that named her successor, the same ceremonial duty Al Gore had performed in 2001 and Richard Nixon had performed in 1961.