Harris has remained in touch with her Indian aunts and uncles throughout her adult life. Gopalan, a retired Indian civil servant whose progressive views on democracy and women's rights impressed her. She says she has been strongly influenced by her maternal grandfather P. As children, she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai) several times. Their mother introduced them to Hinduism and took them to a nearby Hindu temple, where she occasionally sang. Ī neighbor regularly took the Harris girls to an African American church in Oakland where they sang in the children's choir, and the girls and their mother also frequently visited a nearby African American cultural center. When Harris began kindergarten, she was bused as part of Berkeley's comprehensive desegregation program to Thousand Oaks Elementary School, a public school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley which previously had been 95 percent white, and after the desegregation plan went into effect became 40 percent Black. They stayed briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, then at a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley, an area often called the "flatlands" with a significant black population. Harris and her younger sister Maya lived in Berkeley, California, during and after her parents' studies. Harris's childhood home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley
She began her career in the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, before being recruited to the San Francisco District Attorney's Office and later the City Attorney of San Francisco's office. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017 and as a United States senator representing California from 2017 to 2021.īorn in Oakland, California, Harris graduated from Howard University and the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. history, as well as the first African American and first Asian American vice president.
She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. Kamala Devi Harris ( / ˈ k ɑː m ə l ə ˈ d eɪ v i/ ( listen) KAH-mə-lə DAY-vee born October 20, 1964) is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th and current vice president of the United States.