Mom Shyamala Gopalan & Dad Donald J. Harris
Shyamala Gopalan was born in southern India in 1938 and Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica that same year.
According to The New York Times, they met in 1962 while earning their Ph.D.s at the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the study group the Afro American Association. They wed the following year and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris in 1964 and Maya Harris in 1967.
“They fell in love in that most American way,” Harris said in her 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, “while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
However, her parents later split.
“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths We Hold. “By the time I was five years old, the bond between them had given way under the weight of incompatibility.”
While Harris wrote her father “remained a part of our lives” after the divorce, she noted “it was really my mother who took charge of our upbringing.”
After working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford and is a professor of economics, emeritus, per his school bio.
Shyamala, who died in 2009 at age 70, was a breast cancer researcher. Breast Cancer Action noted her “work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene transformed the medical establishment’s understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue.”