![]() Kamala Harris with sister and advisor, Maya Lakshmi Harris (right), prepares to speak to women of color in a packed banquet room during the Black Enterprise Women of Power Summit at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nevada on MaPhoto: Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty ImagesĪfter obtaining his own PhD., Donald taught at universities in Illinois and Wisconsin, but strains were beginning to show on the couple’s marriage, and they divorced in 1971 when Harris was 7 years old. following a speech at Berkeley in 1967, and many of the Black student activists Donald and Shyamala befriended would play an influential role in Harris’ early years. Harris would later recall in her autobiography and on the campaign trail that some of her first memories were of attending civil rights protests, giving her what she called a “stroller’s-eye” view of the movement. Kamala means “lotus,” and is also another name for Lakshmi, a Hindu goddess. Harris’ mother chose her name in tribute to her Indian heritage. Their first child, Kamala Devi, was born in Oakland in 1964, the same year Shyamala earned her PhD. The pair bonded over their shared left-wing politics and despite Shyamala’s original intention to return home to India after finishing school - and expectations that she would enter an arranged marriage - she and Donald married in 1963. It was at a meeting in 1962 that she met Donald, and he was immediately taken with the petite (just 5-feet tall) yet confident Shyamala. Newton, a co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Black Power and Black nationalist leaders were also members, including Huey P. Later known as the Afro-American Association, its members included influential activists in the emerging Black consciousness movement, who would go on to establish the field of Black studies as well as the Kwanzaa holiday. Soon after her arrival, Shyamala befriended several Black students and joined an off-campus reading group studying the overlooked works of Black authors. ![]() The pair met during an Afro-American Association meeting at Berkeley She arrived on campus in 1958, two years before her future husband, to pursue her master’s degree in nutrition and endocrinology. Her father was surprised but dug into his savings to fund her first year of school. The Gopalans were progressive parents, instilling the importance of education for all their children.īut Shyamala bristled at the limited education that she, like most other Indian women of the time, received, and after graduating from a woman’s college in New Delhi, she secretly applied to Berkeley, despite the fact that her family had never visited the United States, let alone California. Gopalan, was a member of the privileged, elite, ancient Tamil Brahmin caste, and her mother, Rajam, was a woman’s rights activist and proponent of increased access to birth control for Indian women. Shyamala was born in Madras, in what was then British India. ![]() Instead, Donald applied to the University of California at Berkeley, fueled by accounts of students from the university who had traveled to the Jim Crow South in the early days of the civil rights movement. He secured a prestigious scholarship to pursue advanced studies in economics and shocked his family and educators when he opted not to follow the path of previous scholarship recipients, who had remained within the sphere of the British Empire by studying in Britain. Donald was the son of Afro-Jamaican parents, and he attended local schools before graduating from the University of the West Indies. Harris' parents, Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan, were both born in 1938. Harris’ parents traveled different, yet similar paths to the United States Her trailblazing career, which saw her become the first woman, the first Black and the first South Asian America elected vice president, has its roots in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, and the family, friendships and communities that helped shape Harris’ life. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father who moved to the United States to pursue their educational dreams, Kamala Harris’ story is the story of an increasingly multicultural America. ![]()
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