Kamala Harris
Kamala Devi Harris (born October 20, 1964) is an American attorney and politician. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Harris has served as the junior United States Senator from California since 2017. She had previously served as the 32nd Attorney General of California from 2011 to 2017.
Born in Oakland, California, Harris is a graduate of Howard University and University of California, Hastings College of the Law. In the 1990s, Harris worked in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and the City Attorney of San Francisco’s office. In 2004, Harris was elected District Attorney of San Francisco.
Harris was elected California’s Attorney General in 2010 and reelected in 2014. On November 8, 2016, she defeated Loretta Sanchez in the 2016 Senate election to succeed outgoing Senator Barbara Boxer, becoming California’s third female U.S. Senator and the first of Jamaican or Indian descent.
Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California, to a Tamil Indian mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris (1938–2009), and a Jamaican father, Donald Harris. Her mother was a breast cancer researcher, who emigrated from Madras, Tamil Nadu, India, in 1960, and her father a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley. Her name, Kamala, comes from the Sanskrit word for lotus. She was extremely close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat, and as a child, she frequently visited her family in Besant Nagar, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. She has one younger sister, Maya.
The family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of Harris’ parents attended graduate school. Harris’ parents divorced when she was 7 and her mother was granted custody of the children by court-ordered settlement. After the divorce, her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Québec, Canada, where Shyamala took a position doing research at the Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.
After graduating from Montreal’s Westmount High School in Quebec, Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she majored in political science and economics.
Written Dianne Washington