Started from the bottom, now we’re here!
Kamala Harris, the California senator who ended her bid for president earlier this year, has been selected by former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to be his running mate.
This historic nomination makes Harris the first Black and South Asian woman nominated for vice president by a major political party.
“You make a lot of important decisions as president. But the first one is who you select to be your Vice President,” Biden wrote to supporters Tuesday afternoon. “I’ve decided that Kamala Harris is the best person to help me take this fight to Donald Trump and Mike Pence and then to lead this nation starting in January 2021.”
Born in Oakland and a child of immigrants, Harris, a Howard University graduate and member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, Sorority Incorporated, is no stranger to being the first. In 2015, when she ran for the senate an Economist article highlighted her multi-ethnic background and rise to success billing her as the only contender in the race, “daughter of an Indian cancer researcher and a Jamaican economics professor, she is the first woman, first African-American and first Asian attorney general of California.”
Harris has credited both her mother for immersing her in both her cultures and preparing them for the world, “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” she wrote in her autobiography 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 we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
After graduating from Howard, Harris went on to obtain a law degree from the University of California, Hasting, then began a career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. After becoming San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, she served two terms as California’s attorney general becoming a trailblazer in the democratic party before a junior US senator in 2017. She gained nationwide popularity for her sharp question of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General Willam Barr in pivotal Senate hearings.
Her presidential campaign, “For The People,” was met with initial enthusiasm, but as sentiment lagged she ended her candidacy in December prior to the Iowa primaries in 2020.
Harris endorsed Biden in March saying that she would do “everything in my power to help elect him the next President of the United States.”
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