How Kamala Harris’ Mom Inspired Her To Fight ‘Injustice’: ‘Do Something About It’

Who Are Kamala Harris’ Parents, Shyamala & Donald?Kamala Harris / Instagram

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On November 5, Kamala Harris could make history during the 2024 presidential election. But she couldn’t do it without her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris.

“My early memories of our parents together are very joyful ones. A home filled with laughter and music: Aretha, Coltrane and Miles,” Kamala said during a speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. “At the park, my mother would say, ‘Stay close.’ But my father would say, as he smiled, ‘Run, Kamala, run. Don’t be afraid. Don’t let anything stop you.’ From my earliest years, he taught me to be fearless.”

In particular, Kamala was influenced by her mother, whom she quoted in her remarks.

“My mother had another lesson she used to teach: Never let anyone tell you who you are, you show them who you are,” she said. “She taught us to never complain about injustice, but do something about it.”

Here’s everything you need to know about Kamala Harris’ parents and how her background influences who she is today:

Kamala Harris’ parents met in college.

They both attended University of California Berkeley for graduate school, where they ended up meeting, according to The Mercury News. After graduating from India’s University of Delhi at age 19, Shyamala moved to Berkeley to get her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. Donald graduated from Jamaica’s University College of the West Indies before studying at Berkeley.

The future couple met after joining a group of students who met on Sundays to talk about Black writers who were overlooked by the school’s curriculum and to debate about politics, decolonization, and activism, The Mercury News reported.

Shyamala caught Donald’s eye after she introduced herself following one of his speeches, according to the New York Times. He recalled to the publication that she was “a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men and women.”

And she charmed him. “This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming,” Donald, now an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford, told NYT. “At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history.”

According to Shyamala, she never intended to stay in America, planning to return to India. But Donald changed things. “I never came to stay,” she told a reporter for SF Weekly in 2003. “It’s the old story: I fell in love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came.”

The couple tied the knot while they were still in school.

Watch this video to learn more about Kamala Harris’ grandparents, too:

Kamala’s mom was the daughter of an Indian diplomat and was born in India.

Shyamala was a Tamil Indian-American born in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu. Her father, P.V. Gopalan, was a senior civil servant and a member of the privileged, elite, ancient Tamil Brahmin caste, Biography reports. Shyamala’s mother, Rajam, was a woman’s rights activist and advocated for increased access to birth control for Indian women. Shyamala’s family stressed the importance of education for all their children.

Kamala remembers visiting her grandparents, a diplomat and a women’s rights activist, in India, and shared about it on Instagram.

She wrote in the caption: “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. Those walks made me who I am today.”

Most Indian women received a limited education at the time and, after graduating from a women’s college in New Delhi, Shyamala—who had never visited the U.S.—secretly applied to University of California at Berkeley. Her father ended up using money from his savings to pay for her first year of school, per Biography.

Shyamala started school at Berkeley in 1958—two years before Donald—working toward her master’s degree in nutrition and endocrinology.

And her dad was born in Jamaica.

Donald was born in Jamaica in 1938. He was the son of Afro-Jamaican parents, and he had the majority of his schooling in the country. He eventually graduated from the University of the West Indies, per Biography.

Donald ended up earning a prestigious scholarship to pursue advanced studies in economics and took a different path from previous scholarship recipients who chose to study in the U.K. Instead, inspired by the civil rights movement, Donald applied to Berkeley.

He got accepted and immigrated to the United States to pursue his doctorate degree from the University of California Berkeley, where he met Shyamala. He eventually became a naturalized United States citizen, per his Stanford bio.

He taught at Stanford University from 1972 until 1998, when he took early retirement. He used his time to work on “developing public policies to promote economic growth and advance social equity.”

Kamala visited Jamaica with her family as a child.

Donald took his children on frequent visits to his home country to teach them about their heritage, per an essay he wrote for Jamaica Global Online.

“One of the most vivid and fondest memories I have of that early period with my children is of the visit we made in 1970 to Orange Hill,” Donald wrote. “We trudged through the cow dung and rusted iron gates, up-hill and down-hill, along narrow unkempt paths, to the very end of the family property, all in my eagerness to show to the girls the terrain over which I had wandered daily for hours as a boy.”

Kamala still has cousins in Jamaica, per CNN. “Even talking to you now, I feel some sort of tears from my eyes too, you know,” Sherman Harris told the outlet of his cousin. “It’s like tears of joy.”

Kamala’s parents met at a Black author study group.

After she started at Berkeley, Shyamala joined an off-campus reading group studying the overlooked works of Black authors, per The New York Times. It later became known as the Afro-American Association. Members included influential activists, including Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party. In 1962, Donald joined the group and the two bonded over their political views.

And while Shyamala originally planned to return home to India after finishing her degree (where she would likely have an arranged marriage), she ended up marrying Donald the next year.

Kamala’s parents were both passionate civil rights activists.

Speaking to a virtual crowd at the 2020 Democratic National Convention in August, Kamala said that her parents “fell in love in that most American way—while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” according to PEOPLE.

“My parents would bring me to protests—strapped tightly in my stroller,” she added. Shyamala even met Martin Luther King Jr. when he spoke at Berkeley in 1967.

Her grandparents also held progressive ideals.

Not only were Kamala’s parents involved in the civil rights movement and advocated for social progress, but her grandparents held similar views. She opened up about their passion for access to birth control in an Instagram post shared this September.

“My grandparents were phenomenal. My grandfather fought for and was a defender of the freedom of India, while my grandmother traveled across India—bullhorn in hand—to talk to women about accessing birth control. Their passion and commitment to improving our future led me to where I am today,” Kamala wrote.

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Shyamala and Donald separated when Kamala was just five, according to the BBC. The reason, per Kamala’s book, The Truths We Hold: Donald took a professorship position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Shyamala filed for divorce when Kamala was 7 and won custody of Kamala and her sister, Maya, two years later. “They didn’t fight about money. The only thing they fought about was who got the books,” Kamala wrote in her memoir.

“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed like they had become like oil and water,” she also wrote in her memoir, per the NYT.

In her memoir, the senator also wrote that her parents struggled with “incompatibility” and that she and her sister spent most of their time with their mother. She said that they would see their dad Donald “on weekends and spend summers with him in Palo Alto.”

“[H]ad they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was my mother’s first boyfriend,” Kamala also revealed in her memoir, according to PEOPLE.

And her parents rarely spoke after their divorce.

The split left Shyamala so angry that, for years, she barely interacted with Donald, per the New York Times. Kamala recalled that, when she invited both her parents to her high school graduation, she feared that her mother would not show up, the publication reported.

“She was quite unhappy about the separation, but she had already got used to that and she didn’t want to talk to Don after that,” Shyamala’s brother, Gopalan Balachandran, told the New York Times. “When you love somebody, then love turns into very hard bitterness, you don’t even want to talk to them.”

Kamala’s mom raised her to be a “strong, Black woman.”

Kamala shared a tribute to her mother for Black History Month: “My mother was very intentional about raising my sister, Maya, and me as strong, Black women. She coupled her teachings of civic duty and fearlessness with actions, which included taking us on Thursday nights to Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center near our home.”

She continued: “This #BlackHistoryMonth, I want to lift up my mother and the community at Rainbow Sign who taught us anything was possible, unburdened by what has been.”

Shyamala and Donald both had impressive careers.

Kamala’s mom was a leading breast cancer researcher who worked at UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and the University of Wisconsin, and was eventually part of the Special Commission on Breast Cancer, according to her obituary. The obituary also points out that Shyamala “made substantial contributions to the field of hormones and breast cancer, publishing her research in countless journals and receiving numerous honors. Her discovery sparked a plethora of advancements regarding the role of progesterone and its cellular receptor in breast biology and cancer.”

Donald is a prominent economist who worked at UC Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford University, according to his Stanford bio. His research has focused on “exploring the analytical conception of the process of capital accumulation and its implications for a theory of growth of the economy, with the aim of providing thereby an explanation of the intrinsic character of growth as a process of uneven development,” the bio says.

Donald also served as economic consultant to the Government of Jamaica and as economic adviser to several prime ministers.

Donald Harris C-SPAN

Kamala was particularly close to her mom.

Kamala has spoken about her relationship with her mother a lot in public, praising her for being a strong woman. “I’m the daughter of a mother who broke down all kinds of barriers,” Kamala wrote on Instagram in May. “Shyamala Harris was no more than five feet tall, but if you ever met her you would think she was seven feet tall. She had such spirit and tenacity and I’m thankful every day to have been raised by her.”

In August, she paid tribute to Shyamala in an Instagram post. “My mother always use to say, ‘Don’t just sit around and complain about things. Do something.’ I dearly wish she were here with us this week,” Kamala wrote in caption.

Shyamala died from colon cancer on February 11, 2009.

“It was one of the worst days of my life,” Kamala wrote in a New York Times opinion piece reflecting on the day in 2008, when her mom told her she was diagnosed with colon cancer. “Are my daughters going to be okay?” was one of the last questions Shyamala asked the hospice nurse. Kamala says, “she was focused on being our mother until the very end.”

She added: “And though I miss her every day, I carry her with me wherever I go. I think of the battles she fought, the values she taught me, her commitment to improve health care for us all. There is no title or honor on earth I’ll treasure more than to say I am Shyamala Gopalan Harris’s daughter.”

Kamala’s vote was inspired by her mom, Shyamala.

In 2020, the VP shared on her Instagram that she was voting for folks like her mom.

“#ImVotingFor people like my mother, Shyamala, who taught my sister and me that if you see a problem, you don’t complain about it: you do something about it. It’s because of her that I know change is possible when we put in the work,” she wrote in her caption.

She is super tight with her sister, Maya.

Kamala’s younger sister Maya, 53, is Kamala’s only sibling, and they are extremely close.

“We forged a bond that is unbreakable,” Kamala said of her sister last year in an interview with the Washington Post. “When I think about it, all of the joyous moments in our lives, all of the challenging moments, all of the moments of transition, we have always been together.”

Maya also helped introduce Kamala during this year’s DNC, and talked about their bond. “Growing up, heaven help the poor kid who picked on me because my sister would be there in a flash to have my back,” she said. “Now we’ve got your back as you and Joe fight to protect our democracy.”

Kamala also shared a cute picture of her and Maya rocking bell bottoms and posing back-to-back with each other in another Instagram post, where she noted that she had gone “through a growth spurt and her mom had taken the hem out of her pants.”

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