![]() ![]() She made it look easy, though I know it never was. Helping us with homework at the kitchen table-and shuttling us to church for choir practice. Like so many mothers, she worked around the clock to make it work-packing lunches before we woke up- and paying bills after we went to bed. "Those walks made me who I am today." Donald Harris, 82, is an economics professor at Stanford University but has mostly stayed out of the political spotlight.Īt the 2020 virtual DNC, Harris said of Gopalan: When I was 5, my parents split and my mother raised us mostly on her own. "When I was a young girl visiting my grandparents in India, I’d join my grandfather and his buddies on their morning walk along the beach as they would talk about the importance of fighting for democracy and civil rights," Harris wrote on Instagram last September. ![]() While the couple separated in 1971, their involvement in political causes inspired both of their children. They first saw each other at a civil rights protest and married in 1963 before welcoming two daughters (Kamala in 1964 and Maya in 1967). While earning her PhD in nutrition and endocrinology from UC Berkeley, she met Donald Harris, who had similarly immigrated to the U.S. from India for a doctorate degree.īorn in Chennai India, Gopalan left her home country at age 19 after graduating from the University of Delhi with a degree in science. Gopalan also imbued her daughter with the passion that got her elected to attorney general, then senator, before she made history as the first female, first Black, and first Indian American to be elected Vice President of the United States.Īhead, a look back at Gopalan's life and her influence on Harris's own journey. The Tamil Indian-American cancer researcher and civil rights activist inspired Harris's role as "Momala" to Cole and Ella, her stepchildren with husband Doug Emhoff. It was far from the first time Harris has spoken at a podium about her mother, who passed away from colon cancer in 2009. Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all, including the Black women who are often, too often, overlooked but so often prove they are the backbone of our democracy. But it was her tribute to another female figure-her late mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris-that hinted at Harris's own political journey: When she came here from India at the age of 19, she maybe didn't quite imagine this moment, but she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible, and so I am thinking about her and about the generations of women, Black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women who throughout our nation's history have paved the way for this moment tonight. "While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last." Those were the words from Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will stay with women everywhere long after her historic November 8 acceptance speech.
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