On October 20, 1964, Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, CA. Thanks to her impressive resume and tenacious dedication to justice, the junior senator from California and attorney is considered a top democratic contender for the 2020 presidential race. Before joining the Senate, Harris was the first female African American/Indian American Attorney General of California. Turning 53 today, she is considered a key political figure in the resistance against the Trump Administration and an important advocate for immigrants, the LGBT community, women, and other marginalized Americans.
Harris was born to high achieving parents who were role models for her own professional success. Her Tamil Indian mother was a leading breast cancer researcher who emigrated from India in 1960, while her Jamaican father, currently an economics professor at Stanford University, came to America in 1961 to study at the University of California, Berkeley. She spent her formative years inspired by her Indian diplomat grandfather and the many civil rights protests in her hometown of Berkeley, CA. After attending high school in Quebec, she attended Howard University and then earned her J.D. from University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989.
Pursuing a career in law enforcement, Harris served as deputy district attorney in Alameda County, CA from 1990 to 1998, and then had a series of high-profile positions in San Francisco, earning her recognition from the Los Angeles Daily Journal as one of the top 100 lawyers in California. As the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco (2004-2011), she started many programs, including one that helped first time drug dealers earn a high school diploma. She also set up a special Hate Crimes Unit to help out LGBT children and teens in the San Francisco school system. Additionally, during her tenure as the San Francisco district attorney, she published a book about criminal justice from an economic perspective, “Smart On Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.”
When Harris announced her candidacy for California Attorney General, she was a popular pick, endorsed by California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. When she won, Harris became the first female African American and Indian American attorney general in California’s history. As attorney general (2011-2017), she fought for stricter privacy laws for mobile apps, helped with the housing crisis, fought for prison reform, and set up a new agency, the Bureau of Children’s Justice, to work on issues in the state related to foster care, truancy, childhood trauma, and the juvenile justice system. Additionally, she gained national attention in her speech condemning Mitt Romney at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
When Boxer announced her retirement in 2016, Harris declared her intention to run. She was an early frontrunner and won 62 percent of the votes, winning all but four counties in California. In January 2017, she was sworn into the Senate, just Donald Trump became President of the United States. Harris has been an outspoken critic of the Trump administration. She has been a vocal critic of their immigration policy and the plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act. She recently received major media attention for her prosecutorial questioning technique of various leading political figures during the investigation of Trump’s firing of the former FBI Director, James Comey.
Whatever your politics, Harris is a force with which to be reckoned and an inspiration to all women looking to break the glass ceiling of politics. Happy Birthday!