The country has been on tenterhooks for the news that finally broke today that presidential candidate Joe Biden has chosen his running mate. His pick is Kamala Harris, the first Black woman and the first person of Indian descent to be nominated for national office by a major political party.
Harris is often described as a “daughter of Oakland,” and she herself likes to make reference to her Oakland roots, including at her presidential campaign kick-off event held in Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza in January 2019.
But while she was born in a Kaiser Oakland hospital, Harris was raised and lived in Berkeley until age 12. She was a resident of the Berkeley flats and a student at Thousand Oaks Elementary School, until she moved with her family to Montreal. She came back to the U.S. after high school, graduating from Howard University and UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and later worked as an Alameda County prosecutor before getting elected San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general.
Very excited that @JoeBiden has selected our Senator @KamalaHarris to be the next Vice President of the US. Sen. Harris was raised in Berkeley, went to Berkeley schools, and is a fierce advocate for Berkeley and Democratic values. Our country is lucky to have her leadership. https://t.co/d31Unb9LQB
— Jesse Arreguin #GetVaccinated (@JesseArreguin) August 11, 2020
Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, came to UC Berkeley from India in 1958 to get her Ph.D., met and married a fellow graduate student, Donald Harris, an immigrant from Jamaica. They separated when Harris was young. Harris lived with her mother and sister in an apartment on Bancroft Way, and Harris started kindergarten one year after Berkeley Unified launched its celebrated integration program.
Her time spent in Berkeley were foundational years, Harris told Berkeleyside last year. Read our January 2019 story to learn more about the early years of the next potential vice president of the United States.
