Kamala Harris Born: America's First Female Vice President

Kamala Harris broke multiple barriers as the first woman, first Black person, and first person of South Asian descent to serve as Vice President of the United States. Her career as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general, and U.S. senator built a record of prosecutorial toughness that propelled her onto the national stage. Born in Oakland, California in 1964 to a Jamaican economist father and an Indian cancer researcher mother, Harris grew up in a household shaped by the civil rights movement. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, emigrated from India to pursue a doctorate at UC Berkeley and marched in civil rights protests in the 1960s. Harris attended Howard University, one of the nation's most prominent historically Black colleges, before earning her law degree at UC Hastings. As San Francisco's district attorney from 2004 to 2011, she established herself as a progressive prosecutor, creating a reentry program for drug offenders while maintaining high conviction rates for violent crime. Her election as California attorney general in 2010 made her the first woman and first person of color to hold the office. In the U.S. Senate from 2017, her prosecutorial questioning style during confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh and Jeff Sessions drew national attention. Joe Biden selected her as his running mate in August 2020, and her inauguration as Vice President on January 20, 2021, placed her one heartbeat from the presidency, a position no woman of any background had previously held.