Congratulations to...🌹
Kamala Devi Harris was...
The first woman, first African American and first Asian American Vice President in the history of the United States.👍👌
A Few
Interesting Facts about her...
1.
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.
2.
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. After she was born, they took young Kamala along to protests in a stroller.
3.
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.
“A culture that worships goddesses produces strong women,” Gopalan told the Los Angeles Times in 2004.
4.
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.
5.
In first grade, Harris was bused to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, which was in its second year of integration. 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.
6.
As a child, Harris went to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple—embracing both her South Asian and Black identities. “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.”
7.
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.
8.
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.
9.
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.
10.
After high school, Harris attended Howard University, the prestigious historically Black college in Washington, D.C. She majored in political science and economics, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
11.
While attending law school in San Francisco, Harris lived with her sister, Maya, and helped potty-train Maya’s daughter.
“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. “It will put this place in perspective.”
12.
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.
13.
Harris’ family was initially skeptical of the career choice. While she acknowledged that prosecutors have historically earned a bad reputation, she said she wanted to change the system from the inside.
14.
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. 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.
15.
In 1995, Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco. That December, Harris broke up with him because “she concluded there was no permanency in our relationship,” Brown told Joan Walsh in 2003. “And she was absolutely right.”
16.
After 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.
17.
During this time, Harris courted influential friends among San Francisco’s moneyed elite. In 2003, they would provide the financial backing to make her a formidable candidate in her first campaign for office.
18.
In 2003, she ran for district attorney in San Francisco against incumbent Terence Hallinan, her former boss. 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.”
19.
She was elected in a runoff with 56.5 percent of the vote. With her victory, she became the first Black woman in California to be elected district attorney.
20.
Her friendship with Barack Obama dates back to his run for Senate in 2004. She was the first notable California officeholder to endorse him during his 2008 presidential bid.
21.
She married Doug Emhoff, a corporate lawyer in Los Angeles, in 2014 at a small and private ceremony officiated by her sister. Emhoff has two children from his previous marriage; they call Harris “Momala.”
22.
She ended her presidential campaign in December 2019, a month before the Iowa caucuses, after taking a hard look at her campaign’s financial future and low poll numbers. Internal turmoil cost her presidential bid, with aides accusing Harris of mistreating her staff with sudden layoffs and allowing her sister, Maya, to have too much influence.
23.
She delayed her endorsement for Biden until March 8, when there were no more women left in the race and his nomination was undeniable. Six days after the California primary, she threw her support behind Biden and said he was a leader who could “unify the people.”
24.
She’s an enthusiastic cook who bookmarks recipes from the New York Times’ cooking section and has tried almost all the recipes from Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food. Her go-to dinner entree is a simple roast chicken.
25.
She typically wakes up around 6 a.m. and works out for half an hour on the elliptical or SoulCycle. She’ll start the day with a bowl of Raisin Bran with almond milk and tea with honey and lemon before leaving for work.
26.
She describes herself as a “tough” boss—although mostly on herself.
Information collected by ...
Kanak Lata Mishra
Librarian, KV Khichripur
