Kamala Harris

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

Kamala Harris was born on October 20, 1964 in Oakland, California to a Tamil Indian mother and a Jamaican father. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast-cancer scientist who immigrated to the United States from Madras (present-day Chennai), India in 1960.^[3][4] She insisted on giving her daughters Sanskrit names derived from Hindu mythology to help preserve their cultural identity.^[5] Her father, Donald Harris, is a Stanford University economics professor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at University of California, Berkeley.^[6][7] Recalling the lives of his grandmothers, Donald Harris wrote that one was related to a plantation and slave owner while the other had unknown ancestry.^[8] She identifies as Indian and black. In a 2019 interview, Kamala Harris said, "'I am black and I am proud of it.'"^[9] 


Harris's family lived in Berkeley, California, where both of her parents attended graduate school.^[10] She was close to her maternal grandfather, P. V. Gopalan, an Indian diplomat.^[4][11] As a child, she often visited her extended family in the Besant Nagar neighborhood of Chennai, Tamil Nadu.^[12] She grew up going to both a Baptist black church and a Hindu temple.^[13] 

Harris began kindergarten during the second year of Berkeley's school desegregation busing program, which pioneered the extensive use of busing to bring racial balance to each of the city's public schools; a bus took her to a school which two years earlier had been 95% white.^[17][18] Her parents divorced when she was seven, and her mother was granted custody of the children.^[10][8] After the divorce, when Harris was 12,^[19] her mother moved with the children to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where Shyamala accepted a position doing research at Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.^[20][21]

As a teenager she co-founded a small dance troupe of six dancers that played at community center and fundraisers.^[22] At Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, she was a popular student.^[23]

After graduating in 1981,^[24][25] Harris majored in political science and economics at Howard University in Washington, D.C.^[26][27] At Howard, she was elected to the liberal-arts student council as freshman class representative, was a member of the debate team, and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.^[26]

Harris returned to California, where she earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989.^[7][28] She was admitted to the State Bar of California in 1990.^[29]