The evolution of Kamala Harris: from activist in pigtails to presidential candidate

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It was the first week of July. News of the presidential election had been mired, for eight days, in alarming assessments of Joe Biden and that shambolic debate. The president had started but not finished sentences, slurred words and at points stood with his mouth slightly agape while his opponent, Donald Trump, ignored questions and lied without fact-check.

Now, on 6 July, inside New Orleans’s convention center, the 30th annual Essence Festival of Culture was under way. Kamala Harris was set to speak, one of the vice-president’s biggest in-person events since Biden’s performance had seemingly upended the race. The attendees – mostly Black women, drawn to this long-running music-festival-meets-women’s-expo – were waiting to see Harris. Some were chattering about the possibilities: did her future lie at the top of the Democratic party’s ticket? What could, or should, happen next? The press corps now trailing Harris had swelled in size, and began to scribble notes and scramble for a look as Harris walked across the stage as the defiant second chorus of Beyoncé’s Freedom boomed. A rousing cheer came from the standing-room-only crowd in the cavernous, 600-seat room.

“Who is Kamala Harris?” Caroline Wanga, the CEO and president of Essence Ventures asked, as she began a “Chief to Chief” conversation, the live version of an interview published each month in Essence, the Black women’s magazine. The conversations are supposed to illuminate what makes the subjects human, their struggles and lessons learned, the moments of victory and defeat and what distinguishes Black women who lead.

“The vice-president of the United States,” Harris responded, setting off another extended cheer from the crowd. “I am a wife. We have children. I am a god-mommy. I am an auntie. I am a best friend. I am a good cook … and you know, I am a fighter for people. I am prepared to fight.”

Until late July, Harris had been the running mate of the oldest man to seek the presidency. Today, Harris, the nation’s first Black and south Asian and female vice-president, who was once characterized as a public official struggling to find her footing, is a presidential candidate with a narrow lead. When the big change happened – not by death but by swelling doubt – Harris appeared to have surprised all but those who have long known her.

People who know Harris well say what the US is witnessing is the confidence, charisma and net effect of practical experience at multiple levels of government, a woman raised to work hard, to operate with compassion and to push past the comfortable toward what is necessary and right. That’s always been there, but it was, perhaps, not always grasped by the public or press. Harris, friends and mentors say, was subjected to constant and unusual forms of scrutiny and given a series of particularly complex, intractable tasks that no one could wrap in a single term as vice-president.

What is indisputable is that Harris is a woman running for the nation’s highest office at a moment when democracy is at stake. Her candidacy is historic, and the next few weeks leading up to the presidential election will alter the course of American politics for better or worse.

‘She was at marches in a stroller’

“She’s always been a go-getter,” said Areva Martin, a CNN legal analyst and lawyer who first met Harris in the late 1980s. Martin, then a student at the University of Chicago, was visiting her brother, a student at Howard University in Washington DC, where Harris was also enrolled, when the two first connected. The women hit it off and have remained friends. “She’s always had a lot of confidence and a concept that anything that wasn’t right, that wasn’t working, was hers to try and change,” Martin said. “If you hear her talking about growing up with her parents, who were very active in the civil rights movement, it’s in her DNA. She was at marches in a stroller.”

Born in October 1964, Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican father and an Indian mother who met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. The Harrises were committed civil rights activists during a time of radical political thought and activity and also, respectively, an economist and a breast cancer researcher. Harris was a toddler when Donald Harris’s academic career forced the family to decamp to Illinois, where Harris’s younger sister, Maya, was born. When Harris’s parents split up in the early 1970s, Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, moved Kamala and Maya back to Berkeley. The girls were raised with direct engagement with two cultures and a firm grounding in the realities of race in the United States. There were trips to an area Hindu temple, and lots of south Indian food which, with a few spice changes, Gopalan would often make into soul food.

At home, there were ample amounts of gospel music, which Gopalan, a singer, loved. The Harris girls also went with a neighbor to a Black church and sang in the children’s choir. During summers with their dad, there was lots of jazz. Gopalan, for her part, counted writers and activists among her closest friends. “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris wrote in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold. “She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls and she was determined to make sure that we would grow into confident, proud Black women.” (Harris’s staff declined to make Harris available for this story.)

Gopalan and the girls lived in a Black neighborhood, and the children were bussed along with other Black students to a white school in another part of town as part of the school district’s integration plan. Harris was a civil rights foot soldier in pigtails. Later, at Howard University – widely considered the nation’s premier institution of all the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) – Harris encountered so many Black people with different interests, class backgrounds, experiences and cultures that, she wrote in her book, she felt like she was in heaven. She was one of at least two Kamalas on campus.

Harris, then fond of popped collars and her short natural curls, studied political science and economics. Yearbooks show she was active in the California Student Association and the debate team and chaired the economics society. It was at Howard where she ran for her first office: freshman class representative. She had a summer gig at McDonald’s, as well as internships with a US senator and at the Federal Trade Commission. At the National Archives, where the original Declaration of Independence, constitution and Bill of Rights as well as every administration’s papers are held, the country’s future first female vice-president was on research. And while working as a tour guide at the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Harris got her first official code name: “TG-10” for “tour guide No 10”.

Then there was Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc, one of the nine Black sororities and fraternities, which Harris joined while she was an undergraduate. The groups were founded during the early 20th century so that a select group of college-educated Black Americans might have networks through which they could access jobs, loans, business deals, healthcare and even a safe place to stay. The Divine Nine, as the collective is called, were countervailing forces in a segregated country where the social order planted white Americans at the top and was often enforced by violence.

Being an AKA has been a way for Harris to embrace self-affirming merriment and matters of global significance. “On Fridays, my friends and I would dress up in our best clothes and peacock around the Yard,” she wrote in her book. “On weekends, we went down to the National Mall to protest apartheid in South Africa.”

“She’s just always been a force,” said Inez Brown, who pledged AKA with Harris in the spring of 1986. “I always said, Kamala is going to be a supreme court justice, because once I knew she was headed for law school, I was like she is going to do something really different. That was just her energy.”

When Maya gave birth to a daughter at 17, Harris went back home to California for law school, opting for the state university system’s oldest law school, then known as the University of California, Hastings College of the Law (or UC Hastings, now UC Law San Francisco). When Harris was a student there, she and her mother helped to care for her niece, so that Maya could graduate from the University of California, Berkeley and then Stanford Law School on time.

In law school, Harris led the Black Law Students Association and was among an early, small group of Black students who spoke of wanting to become prosecutors, said Shauna Marshall, a semi-retired professor at the law school and co-director of its Center for Racial and Economic Justice. Marshall has known Harris since the early 1990s. While Harris was in law school, she and a few other students had begun to understand a district attorney’s powerful decision-making authority – who should be charged, if at all, with what, and how long a judge should be asked to jail those convicted – and wanted it applied more fairly.

“I think both of their career choices came directly from their mother’s activism,” Marshall said about the Harris sisters.

In 1988, Harris took an internship in the Alameda county district attorney’s office, the place where the supreme court justice Earl Warren – a chief justice whose court transformed the nation, vastly expanding civil rights and liberties to millions of Americans – had been chief prosecutor. She was one of a handful of Black lawyers in the office. It was the height of the crack epidemic, and Harris managed to convince a court to free a woman wrongly arrested in a drug raid. But, like 40% of people who took the California bar exam the next summer, Harris failed. She passed on her second try in 1990 and joined the Alameda prosecutor’s staff, specializing in the prosecution of sex crimes.

In a 2019 speech, Harris told the South Carolina NAACP that when it was time to decide what type of lawyer she would be, her family gathered for a conversation. They wanted to know: “Kamala, what are you going to do in your fight for justice?” Explaining why she wanted to be a prosecutor to that group was a bit like defending a thesis, she said.

“I know and I knew then prosecutors have not always done the work of justice,” Harris said. “There have been prosecutors who refused to seat Black jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, disproportionately condemned Black men to death row and looked the other way in the face of police brutality.” But, Harris said, like other lawyers she admired, she decided to “believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been”.

There have been moments that convinced her it was the right choice. Once inside the Alameda county prosecutor’s office, Harris was one of a handful of Black prosecutors. One day, she overheard white colleagues chatting in the hall about how to prove that defendants had been in gangs to apply longer sentences. The conversation was riddled with assumptions and stereotypes. One person suggested looking at the person’s neighborhood. Another suggested the truth was in a defendant’s clothes or music. Harris interrupted: the neighborhood they had discussed was one where she had friends and family. The clothes they described were considered stylish. The music, well, she had that on a tape in her car outside.

From district attorney to state attorney general

After nearly a decade, Harris was recruited to run the career criminal unit in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, focused on violent and repeat criminals, and was responsible for many of the cases whose outcomes were shaped by California’s contribution to the “tough on crime” era – actions states were incentivized to take under a 1994 federal crime bill brokered by then senator Joe Biden.

California’s “three strikes” law and federal money to build more prisons made anyone convicted of three felony crimes, even non-violent offenses, eligible for a life sentence. Harris was among those in the San Francisco district attorney’s office who pushed the agency to seek third-strike treatment only if the felonies involved were serious or violent crimes. But the issue and the racial disparities it deepened were bigger than any one prosecutor or DAs office. Today, the Vera Institute for Justice describes California as “one of the epicenters of mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerating more people than any other state except Texas”.

Harris lasted in the San Francisco career criminal division for 18 months before San Francisco’s city attorney called. She wanted Harris to come work on child welfare cases. Harris took the job with a condition: she would do court work and policy.

“The work was meaningful, empowering and ... [i]t also boosted my confidence that when I saw problems, I could be the one to help devise the solutions,” Harris wrote in her book. “All those times my mother had pressed me – ‘Well, what did you do?’ – suddenly made a lot more sense.”

The experience was instructive. Harris, prompted by a friend she had met while serving on a non-profit board, ran for San Francisco district attorney. She defeated the incumbent, her old boss, and became the first person of color or woman to serve as district attorney. She was one of three elected Black district attorneys in the entire country.

Just two years into her first term, Harris launched what was then a rare program, Back on Track, wherein first-time defendants aged 18-30 would plead guilty to non-violent crimes – and in exchange for getting a job or going to school, performing community service and making use of social workers, see their records expunged. Most years during the rest of Harris’s tenure, the program enrolled 100 or fewer participants, according to district attorney office data. But, only 10% of participants wound up back in the criminal justice system, compared to about half of otherwise comparable defendants in California. The program was evidence that Harris was trying to make good on the logic that had driven the decision to become a prosecutor, said Marshall, who served on the program’s advisory committee.

The push and pull between being an insider who wants to change a troubled system, and working inside a system that has helped to sustain American racial inequality created tension for Harris after she ran for and won the California attorney general’s office in 2010, another role once held by Warren.

In the attorney general’s office, Harris found herself defending the decisions of what she described as her clients – state agencies – in court. In 2011, that included the corrections department’s decision not to release all prisoners as per a US supreme court order, after evidence of malnutrition and dangerous levels of overcrowding were found in California’s prisons. Governing magazine found that California finally met the court’s mandates in 2015, while Harris was attorney general. What made the difference: voters approved measures reducing the punishment for a number of crimes, prompting prison populations to fall.

Critics also often point to Harris’s belief that lives could be saved by disrupting the link between truancy and crime. In San Francisco, Harris’s team had discovered that many children missed school not because of their families’ views about education but because they had significant family problems such as no home, no clean clothes, or they needed to babysit an ill sibling so that parents would not miss work. So, they offered these families services that cut truancy by 23% in two years, according to San Francisco school district data reported by the attorney general’s office. But even in this system, some parents were hit with misdemeanor criminal charges, fines and other deterrent measures.

Anthony Rackauckas Jr, a “law and order” tough-on-crime district attorney in southern California, used the state truancy law that Harris had championed to have a number of parents, many of them Black, Latino or caring for disabled children, arrested. Harris bore much of the public blame. The law remains in place, as do real differences in the way some district attorneys apply it.

In a 2019 interview with HuffPost, Jeff Adachi, a former chief public defender of San Francisco, said: “I think it was a good thing that [Harris] shined a light on [truancy]. There is a correlation between children who fail at school and what happens later in life. [But] the idea of locking parents up, or citing them with a crime because they’re not taking their children to school – it doesn’t address the root of the problem.”

Meeting Doug Emhoff

In 2014, at 49, Harris got married for the first time. Harris met Douglas Emhoff, a California lawyer, on a blind date set up by Harris’s best friend. The connection came with habit-aware instructions: you are going on a date. Do not Google him in advance. You will give him a chance. Harris has said she abided by two of the three.

Harris discovered that she liked Emhoff almost immediately, she wrote in her book. Emhoff has said that he too was instantly smitten. So, when Harris warned him on that first date that she was a very busy woman, Emhoff went home and emailed a list of dates when he was available for the next few months. People around her noticed the difference Emhoff made.

“They would later refer to that era as ‘AD – After Doug’,” Harris wrote. “They loved how much he made me laugh. I did too.”

At their August wedding, officiated by Harris’s sister, Harris put a flower garland around Emhoff’s neck, a traditional Indian wedding practice, and he stomped on a covered glass, a Jewish wedding tradition. Harris really liked Emhoff’s kids: his son, Cole, and daughter, Ella, named after John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald. Harris instituted a tradition of sit-down Sunday dinners with her new family. Cooking together and talking in the kitchen, Harris has said, features prominently in her memories of her own mother, who died of cancer in 2009.

Harris and Emhoff were still newlyweds when the US senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, announced that she would not seek a sixth term in January 2015. One week later, Harris was in the Senate race. Joe Biden, then the vice-president, swore her into office.

Family and lots of friends, including Brown and several more of Harris’s AKA sisters, watched Harris become the first Black senator from California and the only Black woman in the US Senate. In fact, Harris was only the second Black woman to become a senator in the US and the first woman of south Asian descent to do so.

White House ambitions

When Harris decided to launch a 2020 bid for the White House, she’d been in the Senate about three years. Harris had sponsored 164 bills and/or co-sponsored another 1,197. (Twenty-five have since become law, according to federal records.) As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, she had grilled some witnesses – Brett Kavanaugh, the future supreme court justice among them – in ways that had, for a time, captured the country’s attention.

But, her 2020 presidential campaign never seemed to gain momentum under the weight of the widespread condemnation of the American criminal justice system that peaked after the murder of George Floyd.

The most significant moment of the short-lived campaign probably came on a primary debate stage. Harris asked Biden to acknowledge that during his long tenure in the Senate, his work with avowed segregationists to stymie federal funding that would have facilitated more busing to integrate schools had been wrong. One of those children to whom bussing had brought opportunities, Harris said on stage, “was me”.

But just as the broader culture was undergoing an alleged racial reckoning, similar discussions were happening inside politics. Biden wasn’t the only white power player already well over 70 and going nowhere. Black women, long the backbone of the Democratic party’s voter and organizing base remained scarce in senior positions. Outside consultants and party officials often spent money and political capital in the pursuit of white swing voters, a relatively small group. So, when decisions were being made, when policy priorities were being set, few Black women, and few people born after the July 1964 Civil Rights Act, for that matter, were in those rooms. There was a sense that a debt was owed, the bill was due.

Political leaders like Karen Finney, a political strategist and former spokesperson for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and communications director at the Democratic National Committee; Glynda Carr, president and CEO of Higher Heights for America, which works to grow Black women’s political power; Donna Brazile, a political strategist, two-time chair of the Democratic party and the first Black woman to run a presidential campaign; and Minyon Moore, a former Clinton administration official and political consultant, now serving as chair of the 2024 party convention, began to talk about the fact that there were Black women qualified for the vice-president’s job and they should be considered, Finney said.

Their recommendation – made in a Zoom meeting with Biden and his team – was Harris.

When the story is told by Harris’s opponents, she is the typecasted VP, someone selected in a process that didn’t start with résumés or even political calculus. In reality, just about every vice-president was picked much the same way. Only, time and time again, no Black women had been considered.

“It’s a political strategy on the part of the Republican party to undermine [Harris] and to undermine her qualifications,” Finney said. “And unfortunately ... this is a very typical playbook that’s often used.”

Women’s issues? ‘Oh, you mean the economy’

In the White House, Biden gave Harris early tasks which, at minimum, must be described as hard. Chief among them: identifying and helping the administration to address the root causes of the increase in undocumented immigration. Getting to the root causes and their solutions by traveling to Guatemala and Mexico was never going to generate photos of Harris hanging out of the top of a tank or standing at the border with a bullhorn. That really wasn’t Harris’s style or the nature of her assignment, either.

Harris didn’t stave off the critics. During a sit-down interview, Harris laughed when Lester Holt, the NBC Nightly News anchor, asked when she would visit the US-Mexico border. The causes of illegal immigration don’t begin within a few feet of the Rio Grande and she hadn’t personally visited Europe either, she responded, saying no one was accusing her of ignoring or avoiding issues there. Republican officials pounced. There was, in Trump’s view, an “invasion” at the border. And many Democrats weren’t happy with a directive Harris issued to undocumented immigrants in a subsequent press conference: “Don’t come” – seeking asylum at a US border crossing is a legal act.

“We had never had a Black female vice-president,” said Finney. “She was basically doing the job in her own way but it’s a role that was created for white men. So of course she’s not going to be doing it in the same way all the men before her did it.”

The rest of Harris’s portfolio has been largely complicated or long-running matters of domestic concern including gun violence, barriers to entrepreneurship and full economic inclusion for all Americans, maternal healthcare and “gender policy”. Harris has said that when people ask her to talk about “women’s issues”, she often replies: “Oh, you mean the economy.”

As vice-president in Washington, Harris cast 33 tie-breaking votes in the US Senate, many to complete or move forward Biden’s nominees for various senior-level federal jobs. She also broke ties more than any other vice-president in history. And she has become the administration’s foremost voice on abortion access.

She spoke about it in ways that many who weren’t in the meetings on other issues or working in the vice-president’s office began to notice in March when Harris became the first vice-president to visit a healthcare facility offering abortions in St Paul, Minnesota. There, Harris discussed women’s healthcare and the situation emerging in states that have banned abortions, and warned reporters and others there to brace themselves because she was going to use anatomically correct terms and use the “bouquet of microphones” to share women’s experiences. Tim Walz, the governor, was standing right behind her.

“When she was given the roles ... then she was able to speak, and she did so very confidently, very boldly,” said Christian Nunes, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW).

The birth of the Harris campaign

On 21 July, Harris’s campaign filed paperwork only hours after Biden’s announcement, making her an official candidate for the White House. By that evening, it was clear: this was different.

More than 40,000 Black women gathered for a Zoom meeting that night to recognize the significance of the moment, raise money and start organizing. The volume of interest required an exception to Zoom’s virtual meeting size limits, and $1.6m was raised in a few hours. The concept of extremely frank, in-group conversations – about this moment and the specific responses different groups of voters could have, and the stakes they should contemplate – gained traction. White Dudes for Harris, Black Men for Harris, Evangelicals for Harris and Republicans for Harris have gathered in the weeks since.

One participant in the estimated 160,000-person white women’s Zoom said every woman and girl in the country faced real threats under a possible second Trump administration, including a loss of control over their bodies and, with that, their lives. “Your whiteness,” one woman in the same Zoom meeting said, “will not save you.” At the same time, over on social media, Kamala was chartreuse green; Kamala was brat. Supercuts of Kamala captured her dancing with marching bands and confidently delivering lacerating, pro-Harris assessments of Trump, some of them backed by the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us and Chappell Roan’s Femininomenon.

“You can’t buy that,” said Cornell Belcher, a pollster and founder of the political strategy firm Brilliant Corners who knows Harris and may be best known for his work on the Obama campaigns. “That’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars and it has to happen organically.”

Four days after Harris declared herself a candidate for the presidency, she was in Indianapolis, inside the Indiana convention center to address more than 6,000 members of the Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Inc, another member of the Divine Nine.

“In this moment,” Harris told the people seated at a sea of round tables before her, “I believe that we face a choice between two different visions for our nation, one focused on the future and the other focused on the past. And with your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”

“Recognize there are those who are trying to take us back,” Harris continued. “But we are not going back.”

It was the birth of the Harris campaign.