She was elected in a runoff with 56.5 percentof the vote. Her message, a top strategist on that campaign told POLITICO, was: “We’re progressive, like Terence Hallinan, but we’re competent like Terence Hallinan is not.” In 2003, she ran for district attorney in San Francisco against incumbent Terence Hallinan, her former boss. In 2003, they would provide the financial backing to make her a formidable candidate in her first campaign for office. “And she was absolutely right.”Īfter being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney’s office by a former colleague in Alameda, Harris cracked down on teenage prostitution in the city, reorienting law enforcement’s approach to focus on the girls as victims rather than as criminals selling sex.ĭuring this time, Harris courted influential friends among San Francisco’s moneyed elite. That December, Harris broke up with him because “she concluded there was no permanency in our relationship,” Brown told Joan Walsh in 2003. In 1995, Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco. From his perch in the assembly, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission-positions that together paid her around $80,000 a year on top of her prosecutor’s salary. In 1994, Harris began dating Willie Brown, a powerhouse in California politics who was then the speaker of the state assembly and was 30 years older than Harris. While she acknowledged that prosecutors have historically earned a bad reputation, she said she wanted to change the system from the inside. Harris’ family was initially skeptical of the career choice. In 1990, after passing the bar, Harris joined the Alameda County prosecutor’s office in Oakland as an assistant district attorney focusing on sex crimes. “I’m dealing with this brutal stuff, dog-eat-dog in school, and then I would come home and we would all stand by the toilet and wave bye to a piece of shit,” Harris recalled in 2018. While attending law school in San Francisco, Harris lived with her sister, Maya, and helped potty-train Maya’s daughter. She majored in political science and economics, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. In Montreal, a 13-year-old Harris and her younger sister, Maya, led a successful demonstration in front of their apartment building in protest of a policy that banned children from playing on the lawn.Īfter high school, Harris attended Howard University, the prestigious historically Black college in Washington, D.C. Harris attended middle school and high school in Montreal after her mom got a teaching job at McGill University and a position as a cancer researcher at Jewish General Hospital. She visited India as a child and 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. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters,” Harris later wrote in her autobiography, “and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud black women.” For the next three years, she’d play “Miss Mary Mack” and cat’s cradle with her friends on the bus that traveled from her predominantly black, lower-middle-class neighborhood to her school located in a prosperous white district.Īs a child, Harris went to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple-embracing both her South Asian and Black identities. In first grade, Harris was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, which was in its second year of integration. Harris’ parents divorced when she was 7, and her mother raised her and her sister, Maya, on the top floor of a yellow duplex in Berkeley. “A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” Gopalan told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. Her mother chose Kamala’s name as a nod both to her Indian roots-Kamala means “lotus” and is another name for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi-and the empowerment of women. After she was born, they took young Kamala along to protests in a stroller. Her parents met at UC Berkeley while pursuing graduate degrees, and bonded over a shared passion for the civil rights movement, which was active on campus. Kamala Devi Harris was born in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964, the eldest of two children born to Shyamala Gopalan, a cancer researcher from India, and Donald Harris, an economist from Jamaica.
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