The making of Kamala Harris, from slaver ancestry to civil rights

If Kamala Harris owes her place in history to anyone, it is to the 26-year-old Indian immigrant who gave birth to her at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California, in the autumn of 1964. Perhaps it was no coincidence that her birth came just two weeks before election day, and that it came in California. It was a year and a state that proved to be the perfect incubator for a girl who grew up proving that social progress and bare-knuckle politics go hand in hand.
Harris misses little and forgets even less. She has loyal supporters who have been part of her political organisation from the start, and she has alienated people who were once as close as family. When the cameras aren’t on, she has exhibited empathy and acts of kindness for people who could not help her, and some people who have known her well see her as cold and calculating.
Mostly, she is her mother’s daughter. People who work closely with her say hardly a week goes by without her recalling some nugget of wisdom passed along by Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died in 2009. The one she most often repeats publicly: “You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.”
Sometimes, at big moments in her life, she wells up when she remembers her mother, clearly wishing she were by her side. “My mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a force of nature and the greatest source of inspiration in my life,” Harris wrote in an Instagram tribute during Women’s History Month in 2020. “She taught my sister Maya and me the importance of hard work and to believe in our power to right what is wrong.”
Shyamala Gopalan stood a little taller than five feet. She was the eldest of four children of a senior civil servant in a family of high achievers, in a nation that gained its independence from Britain in 1947, nine years after she was born. She was 19 in 1958 when she graduated with a degree in home science from Lady Irwin College in Delhi, India, and with her father’s blessing, travelled to Berkeley in search of a higher education.
Studying nutrition and endocrinology, she received her PhD and, in the decades ahead, gained recognition for her research in breast cancer. She published more than 100 research papers in academic journals and raised $4.76 million in grants for her work.
“From both of my grandparents, my mother developed a keen political consciousness,” Harris wrote in her 2019 autobiography, The Truths We Hold. “She was conscious of history, conscious of struggle, conscious of inequities.”
In the autumn of 1962, Gopalan attended a gathering of black students where the speaker was a young graduate student from Jamaica, Donald Jasper Harris, who was studying to become an economist.
He had emigrated from Jamaica in 1961, arriving in Berkeley also in search of an education. He was a bit of a radical, or, as economists might say, a “heterodox”. He was described as Marxist in the Stanford Daily, a student newspaper.
Gopalan, wearing a traditional sari, came up to him after his lecture. She charmed him, they met and spoke a few more times, and, as he said, “the rest is now history”. Gopalan and Harris married in 1963, the year after Jamaica gained its own independence from the United Kingdom. Kamala Devi was born in 1964, and her sister, Maya Lakshmi, two years after that.
In the mid to late 1960s both parents were active in the civil rights movement. Harris tells of being wheeled to demonstrations in a pram. She tells the family tale that on one occasion, as she was fussing in the pram, her mother asked what she wanted. “Fweedom!” she is said to have answered. (It has subsequently been pointed that this story has close similarities to one told by Dr Martin Luther King.)
Shyamala and Donald separated in 1969, when Donald was teaching at the University of Wisconsin and when Kamala was five and Maya was three. They filed for divorce in January 1972. Harris wrote in her autobiography that “had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was my mother’s first boyfriend.”
In a 2018 essay Donald Harris lamented that close contact with Kamala and Maya “came to an abrupt halt” after a contentious custody battle. He blamed the custody arrangement on “the false assumption by the state of California that fathers cannot handle parenting”. He wrote: “Nevertheless, I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”
The final divorce judgment, dated July 23, 1973, shows Shyamala gained physical custody, but that Donald was entitled to take the girls on alternating weekends and for 60 days in the summer. He writes about bringing his daughters to Jamaica to meet relatives and show them the world he knew as a child, showing them the “juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth”.
Try as he did, the lessons taught to Harris by her mother seems to have stuck more. Harris weaves references to her mother throughout her autobiography. She mentions her father on fewer than a dozen pages. “My father is a good guy, but we are not close,” she told an interviewer in 2003.
In her official biography on the California attorney-general’s website, Harris describes herself as “the daughter of Dr Gopalan, a Tamilian breast cancer specialist”. That biography makes no mention of her father.
Her father’s side provides other challenges for Harris too, adding to the complexities of her mixed heritage. In that same 2018 essay about his Jamaican forebears, Donald Harris reveals the existence of an ancestor called Hamilton Brown. “My roots go back,” he wrote, “within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother, Miss Chrishy née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as a plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town.”
Hamilton Brown was born in about 1775 in Co Antrim, Ireland, and sailed as a young man to the Caribbean island of Jamaica. His first recorded act in his new homeland took place in 1803, when he sold black people to another man. In the next three decades, Brown became a willing participant in and perpetrator of the brutal system of Jamaican slavery and was one of its outspoken defenders against the abolitionist movement led by Baptists and Methodists.
In contrast to that legacy, Shyamala and Donald Harris’s romance flourished amid the burgeoning civil rights activism of the 1960s. They lived in Berkeley and Oakland when those cities were at the centre of a transformative political moment. The anti–Vietnam War movement, the rise of environmentalism, demands for racial justice, the Black Panthers and more were part of the swirl of their times.
“They fell in love in that most American way, while marching for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” Harris said at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, when she accepted her party’s nomination to be Joe Biden’s running-mate.
While Shyamala was witnessing the birth of a new political culture in the United States, she also made sure her daughters knew their Indian heritage and brought them halfway around the world to meet their grandparents. But America and its racial legacy were sinking in. She also understood that “she was raising two black daughters”, and that in this country, people would view them as black, Harris wrote in her autobiography.
Never was this more apparent than in 1968, when Berkeley became the largest city in America to integrate its segregated schools. Buses transported black children from the Berkeley Flats to schools in the Hills, and white children rode buses to schools in the Flats.
Kamala Harris was not on those buses in 1968. She was too young. Nor did she ride on those buses in 1969, the year she entered kindergarten. That year, her parents enrolled her in a Montessori school in Berkeley. But in the autumn of 1970, a five-year-old Harris did board a bus bound for first grade at Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a 2.3-mile ride from her apartment.
Before desegregation, 11 per cent of Thousand Oaks’s students were black. By 1970, more than 40 per cent were black.
Some of the lessons Shyamala taught her daughters took place during Thursday-evening gatherings at Rainbow Sign, a black cultural centre in Berkeley. There, guests included Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman; the musician Nina Simone; and the poet Maya Angelou. “This #BlackHistoryMonth, I want to lift up my mother and the community at Rainbow Sign who taught us anything was possible, unburdened by what has been,” Harris posted on social media in 2020.
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But that lesson was not always true for Shyamala. She had been working at UC Berkeley with a friend, Dr Mina Bissell, who recalled that Shyamala had been promised a promotion that ultimately went to a man. The single mother of Kamala, 12, and Maya, ten, reacted by getting a job teaching at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1976 and researching breast cancer at Jewish General Hospital in that city.
Shyamala had travelled extensively as a child. For her eldest daughter, however, the move was intimidating. Kamala recalls in her memoir that “the thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in 12 feet of snow was distressing”. Shyamala enrolled her in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a French-speaking primary school, and later Westmount High School, one of the oldest English-speaking schools in Quebec.
At Westmount, Kamala Harris took part in pep rallies and started a dance troupe called Midnight Magic, and with five friends by her side, she danced to early 1980s pop in glittery, homemade costumes. But Harris’s high school yearbook entry shows that she yearned to return to the US. She described happiness as “making long-distance phone calls,” and her cherished memory entry reads, “California, Angelo; summer ’80.”
She’s smiling in her yearbook photo, and she would soon be entering her freshman year at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington DC. In that yearbook , Shyamala’s daughter pays homage to the force of nature that was her greatest source of inspiration: “Sp Thks to: My mother.”
Extracted from Kamala’s Way by Dan Morain, who spent 27 years as a reporter and editor at the Los Angeles Times. Published by Simon and Schuster, £9.99