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 very same yr.

According to The New York Times, they met in 1962 whereas incomes their Ph.D.s on the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the examine group the Afro American Association. They wed the next yr and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris in 1964 and Maya Harris in 1967.

“They fell in love in that most American way,” Harris mentioned in her 2020 Democratic National Convention speech, “while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

However, her mother and father later break up.

“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed they’d become like oil and water,” Harris wrote in her guide 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 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 reworked the medical institution’s understanding of the hormone-responsiveness of breast tissue.”