Who is Vice President Kamala Harris?

When President Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he would be stepping away from his presidential campaign and hours later endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Harris was placed in the spotlight.  

Harris’ career has been marked by a string of firsts. She was the first South Asian U.S. senator; California’s first South Asian, first Black, and first female attorney general; the first South Asian and Black woman elected district attorney of San Francisco; and the first Black, first South Asian, and first female vice president. If elected in November, she would be the first woman to serve as president of the United States.  

Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, California, to immigrant parents. Kamala is a Sanskrit word meaning “lotus,” according to her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Told: An American Journey.” 

Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born in Chennai, India. She was a renowned breast cancer researcher who had come to the U.S. at 19 to study. She received her doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley, the same year Harris was born. Shyamala died in 2009.

Harris’ father, Donald Harris, was born in Jamaica and came to the U.S. to study economics at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University. 

Harris’ parents were deeply involved in the American civil rights movement and, according to her White House biography, brought Harris with them to protests when she was still in a stroller. 

Harris’ parents divorced when she and her sister, Maya, were young. 

In 1982, Harris enrolled at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., where she majored in political science and economics and pledged the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. 

Harris graduated from the University of California Hastings College of Law (now University of California Law San Francisco) in 1989. 

Harris served two terms as San Francisco district attorney, from 2004 to 2010, during which she championed bias training for police and criminal diversion programs for young offenders. In her first three years on the job, Harris’ conviction rate rose from 52% to 67%.  

In 2010 she was elected state attorney general., Along with 40 other attorneys general, Harris reached a $25 billion settlement with the country’s five largest mortgage companies over their foreclosure practices.

In 2014, she married lawyer Doug Emhoff and became stepmother to Emhoff’s children Ella and Cole. Harris says they call her “Momala.”

Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 and was sworn in in 2017, assuming the seat vacated by Sen. Barbara Boxer. Serving on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Select Committee on Intelligence before launching a bid for the White House in 2019, Harris grilled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on abortion during his confirmation hearing in 2018. 

Harris ran for president in 2020 but dropped out of the Democratic primary. Biden announced that Harris would be his running mate, and the team defeated President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in the 2020 presidential election., In January 2021, Harris was sworn in as the first female vice president of the United States.

Harris set a record for the most tie-breaking votes cast by a vice president in the history of the Senate. Her vote helped Democrats pass the American Rescue Plan, legislation that provided $1.9 trillion in stimulus money aimed at helping the economy recover from the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As vice president, Harris has been a steadfast advocate of abortion rights. In December 2023, Harris launched the nationwide Fight for Reproductive Freedoms tour, holding a series of events to highlight the stories of those affected by abortion bans and restrictions after the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

“We are living, I do believe, in a moment in time where so many of our hard-won freedoms are under attack,” Harris said at an event at Howard University in 2023. “This is a moment for us to stand and fight.”