https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 09/13/us/kamala-harris- parents.html ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/us/kamala-harris-parents.html )

(Harris's parents were involved in a radical study group in Berkeley. Other 
participants included Huey Newton and future Marxist historian Cedric Robinson. 
Aside from anything about Harris and her parents, the article has a great deal 
of information about a significant formation in Berkeley that I knew nothing 
about.)

"How Kamala Harris's Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other in a Black 
Study Group"

Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on 
different sides of the planet. They were each drawn to Berkeley, and became 
part of an intellectual circle that shaped the rest of their lives.

By Ellen Barry
Sept. 13, 2020

At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall 
of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student addressed a small crowd, drawing 
parallels between his native country and the United States.

He told the group, a roomful of Black students, that he had grown up observing 
British colonial power in Jamaica, the way a small number of whites had 
cultivated a “native Black elite” in order to mask extreme social inequality.

At 24, Donald J. Harris ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/article/kamala-harris-dad-don-harris.html ) was already 
professorial, as reserved as the Anglican acolyte he had once been ( 
https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/kamala-harris-jamaican-heritage/ ). But his 
ideas ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/opinion/ed-markey-young-progressive-voters.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
 ) were edgy. One member of the audience found them so compelling that she came 
up to him after the speech and introduced herself.

She was a tiny Indian scientist wearing a sari and sandals — the only other 
foreign student to show up for a talk on race in America. She was, he recalled, 
“a standout in appearance relative to everybody else in the group of both men 
and women.”

Shyamala Gopalan had been born the same year as Mr. Harris, in another British 
colony on the other side of the planet. But her view of the colonial system was 
more sheltered, the view of a senior civil servant’s daughter, she told him. 
His speech had raised questions for her. She wanted to hear more.

“This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming,” recalled 
Mr. Harris, now 82 and an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford ( 
https://web.stanford.edu/~dharris/professional_career.htm ) , in written 
answers to questions. “At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one 
after that. The rest is now history.”

Senator Kamala Harris often tells the story ( 
https://www.amazon.com/Truths-We-Hold-American-Journey/dp/0525560718 ) of her 
parents’ romance. They were idealistic foreign graduate students ( 
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/10/kamala-harris-president-parents-shyamala-gopalan-donald-harris-berkeley/
 ) who were swept up in the U.S. civil rights movement ( 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/20/kamala-harriss-convention-speech-annotated/
 ) — a variation of the classic American immigration story of huddled masses 
welcomed on its shores.

That description, however, barely scratches the surface of Berkeley in the 
early 1960s ( https://www.pbs.org/pov/watch/berkeleyinthesixties/ ). The 
community where they met was a crucible of radical politics, as the trade-union 
left overlapped with early Black nationalist thinkers.

It brought a wave of Black undergraduates, many the descendants of 
sharecroppers or enslaved people who had migrated from Texas and Louisiana, 
into conversation with students from countries that had fought off colonial 
powers.

Members of the study group that drew them together in 1962, known as the Afro 
American Association, would help build the discipline of Black studies, 
introduce the holiday of Kwanzaa and establish the Black Panther Party.

Long after the particular intensity of the early ’60s passed, the community it 
created endured.

Senator Harris, who declined to comment for this story, was one of the more 
moderate Democrats in the 2020 field of presidential candidates, and has cast 
her political outlook in decidedly pragmatic terms.

“I’m not trying to restructure society,” she said last summer ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/us/politics/kamala-harris-2020-election.html 
). “I’m just trying to take care of the issues that wake people up in the 
middle of the night.”

Still, at high-profile moments — including when she accepted the 
vice-presidential nomination — she has noted the lasting influence of her 
parents’ circle at Berkeley. For Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris, those 
friendships would change everything.

Image
Queen Elizabeth II in New Delhi during a 1961 visit to Lady Irwin College, 
where Ms. Gopalan received a degree in home science. Credit... Central Press 
Photo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

-------------------
‘I had to go there’
-------------------

For decades, the brightest students from British colonies like Jamaica and 
India had been sent, by reflex, to Britain to pursue advanced degrees. But 
Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan were different. Each had a compelling reason 
to want an American education ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/15/us/second-generation-immigrant-kamala-harris.html
 ).

In Ms. Gopalan’s case, the trouble was that she was a woman.

Ms. Gopalan, the oldest child in a high-achieving Tamil Brahmin family, ( 
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-10-25/how-kamala-harris-indian-family-shaped-her-political-career
 ) wanted to be a biochemist. But at Lady Irwin College, founded by the British 
to provide an education in science to Indian women, she had been forced to 
settle for a degree in home science. Her brother and father thought it was 
hilarious.

“My father and I used to tease her like nobody’s business,” said her brother, 
Gopalan Balachandran, who would go on to earn a Ph.D. in computer science and 
economics ( https://www.longdom.org/editor/gopalan-balachandran-11388 ). “We 
would say, ‘What do you study in home science? Do they teach you to set up 
plates for dinner?’ She used to get angry and laugh. She would say, ‘You don’t 
know what I’m studying.’”

His sister died in 2009 ( 
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=shyamala-g-harris&pid=125330757
 ). But in retrospect, he realizes she must have been seething.

“She would have been frustrated like hell,” he said.

But she had a plan: In America — unlike India or the United Kingdom — it was 
still possible to apply for a degree in biochemistry, her brother said. She 
presented her father with a fait accompli: She had been admitted to the 
University of California at Berkeley.

Her father was astonished, her brother said, but not opposed. “He was only 
worried: None of us had been abroad. He said, ‘I don’t know anybody in the 
States. I certainly don’t know anybody in Berkeley.’ She said, ‘Father, don’t 
worry,’” he said. He offered to pay for her first year of studies.

Eight thousand miles away, in 1961, something similar occurred with Mr. Harris 
( https://www.nytimes.com/article/kamala-harris-dad-don-harris.html ) , who was 
seeking a doctorate in economics.

Image

Mr. Harris was born in Jamaica’s St. Ann Parish while it was still under 
British colonial rule. The queen visited in 1953. Credit... Paul 
Popper/Popperfoto, via Getty Images

When he was awarded a prestigious scholarship granted by the British colonial 
government, it was assumed he would study in Britain, like the recipients who 
had preceded him.

But Mr. Harris didn’t want to go to Britain. His early education had marinated 
him in British culture, all of those obedient choruses of “Rule, Brittania.” 
(“Read the words, you’ll be astonished!” he said.) He began to see, he said, 
how Britain’s “static rigidity of pomp, ceremony and class” had been 
transplanted onto plantation society in Jamaica.

No, he was drawn to the United States.

As a teenager he had listened to big-band jazz music broadcast from the U.S. 
naval base in Guantánamo, and stumbled onto a late-night rhythm and blues 
broadcast from WLAC in Nashville. To him, the United States looked — “from a 
distance and perhaps naïvely,” he said — like a “lively and evolving dynamic of 
a racially and ethnically complex society.”

U.C. Berkeley had come to his attention in a news story about student activists 
traveling to the South to campaign for civil rights.

“Further investigation of information about this University convinced me I had 
to go there,” he said.

Using the scholarship to study in the United States was such a “grave departure 
from custom and tradition,” he said, that the permanent secretary of the 
Ministry of Education wrote for advice to an eminent West Indian professor, Sir 
Arthur Lewis, ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/17/obituaries/sir-w-arthur-lewis-76-is-dead-winner-of-nobel-economics-prize.html
 ) who was teaching economics at Manchester University. The deliberation took 
so long that classes had already started when the economist’s letter of 
approval arrived.

“I was overjoyed,” Mr. Harris recalled. Two weeks into the semester, he boarded 
a plane for San Francisco. A meeting had been set in motion.

Image

The University of California at Berkeley’s campus in 1969. The community where 
the couple met in the early 1960s was a crucible of radical politics. Credit... 
Ernest K. Bennett/Associated Press

---------------
Finding a group
---------------

Shyamala Gopalan fell into important friendships at Berkeley right away.

As she stood in line to register for classes, in the fall of 1959, the person 
standing behind her ( 
http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2016/11/robin-d-g-kelly-revisiting-black.html 
) was Cedric Robinson ( 
https://www.independent.com/2016/06/09/ucsb-professor-emeritus-cedric-robinson-dies/
 ) , a Black teenager from Oakland.

In 1960, there were fewer than 100 Black students in a student body of 20,000, 
the historian Donna Murch writes in her book ( 
https://uncpress.org/book/9780807871133/living-for-the-city/ ) “Living for the 
City: Migration, Education and the Rise of the Black Panther Party.

Mr. Robinson, whose grandfather had fled Alabama ( 
http://readingfanon.blogspot.com/2016/11/robin-d-g-kelly-revisiting-black.html 
) in the 1920s to escape a lynching, was the first in his family to enroll in 
college. “As a Black kid from Oakland, he didn’t even know what one did to get 
into the university,” recalled his widow, Elizabeth.

The woman in front of him made an impression. Ms. Gopalan, his elder by two 
years, often wore a sari in those days, and acquaintances said they thought she 
came from royalty; that’s how she carried herself. When Mr. Robinson stepped up 
to the desk, the registrar assumed he was a graduate student from Africa, and 
asked, politely, if his country was also paying his tuition.

Mr. Robinson, who died in 2016, thought that was hilarious, said the historian 
Robin D.G. Kelley ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxRuTQZAT2Y ). He would 
tell that story over the years, as he went on to earn a master’s and a Ph.D ( 
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-461364151/cedric-j-robinson-in-memoriam
 )., then tenure at the University of California at Santa Barbara, writing five 
books along the way. He and Ms. Gopalan would form a lifelong friendship.

When he wrote his best-known book, “Black Marxism: The Making of the Black 
Radical Tradition,” ( https://uncpress.org/book/9780807848296/black-marxism/ ) 
in 1983, he listed the old friends who had helped him formulate his ideas. They 
were all Black, except for Ms. Gopalan.

They would both become part of a Black intellectual study group ( 
https://uncpress.org/book/9780807871133/living-for-the-city/ ) that met in the 
off-campus house of Mary Agnes Lewis, an anthropology student.

The group, later known as the Afro American Association, was “the most 
foundational institution in the Black Power movement,” said Ms. Murch, who 
devotes two chapters to it in her book.

This was no casual book club. Reading was assigned, and if you failed to keep 
up with it you would pay. At one discussion on existentialism, a community 
college student named Huey Newton — the future co-founder of the Black Panther 
Party — was chastised for not having done the reading, recalled Margot 
Dashiell, 78, who went on to become a sociology professor at Laney College.

“He came back the next time and he was fully prepared,” she said.

Those bare-bones gatherings — “there was a lot of floor-sitting,” she recalled 
— were her first exposure to the idea that American Black culture had its 
origins in Africa.

“We were getting a new language,” she said. “We were inventing a new language. 
The first new word was Afro-American. I had never heard it in my life. We were 
not going to be this thing that had no origin, Negro. We were going to be 
calling out our heritage.”

Ms. Dashiell explained that they had all been raised to be “integrationists,” 
to fight for admission to white institutions. “This was a revolutionary turn of 
thought,” she said, “that we have differences but the differences are not bad.”

The group would later limit its membership to people of African descent, 
refusing admission to the white partner of a Black member, Ms. Murch writes.

Image

Students at U.C. Berkeley during a free speech protest in October 1964. 
Credit... Associated Press

ut as a former colonial subject, and a person of color, there was no question 
that Shyamala Gopalan belonged, other members said in interviews.

“She was part of the real brotherhood and sisterhood, there was never an 
issue,” said Aubrey LaBrie, who went on to teach courses on Black nationalism ( 
https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/coes/bundles/218196 ) at San Francisco State 
University. ( https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/coes/bundles/189539 ) “She was 
just accepted as part of the group.”

As part of the group, Ms. Gopalan sometimes joked about the vastly different 
world she had left behind. Ms. Dashiell remembered her laughing with Mr. 
Robinson about a suitor who had approached her family about arranging a 
marriage, sending relatives scrambling to consult astrological charts.

Foreign students were arriving in increasing numbers, representatives of newly 
independent states with nonwhite elites. The groups found each other naturally.

“They were people from somewhere else, who had a broader view of the world, and 
they were people of color,” said the historian Nell I. Painter, 78, whose 
father worked at Berkeley at the time. “I remember people from somewhere else 
as representing a kind of intellectual freedom.”

In 1961, when Mr. Harris arrived on campus, he, too, fell in with the study 
group right away.

On one of his first days at Berkeley, he said, he spotted a Black architecture 
student holding a hand-painted sign, staging a one-man demonstration against 
apartheid in South Africa, and introduced himself. The student turned out to be 
Kenneth Simmons, ( https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/08/02/simmons/ ) a “guiding 
light” in the Afro American Association, along with Ms. Lewis and Mr. Robinson, 
he said.

Mr. Harris described the study group as an oasis, his introduction “to the 
realities of African-American life in its truest and rawest form, its richness 
and complexity, wealth and poverty, hope and despair.”

It was in that company, in the fall of 1962, that he met his future wife. “We 
talked then, continued to talk at a subsequent meeting, and at another, and 
another,” he said. The following year they were married.

Until then Ms. Gopalan had expected to return to India, she reflected years 
later. “I never came to stay,” she told a reporter for SF Weekly ( 
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/kamalas-karma/ ). “It’s the old story: I fell in 
love with a guy, we got married, pretty soon kids came.”

Image

Members of the Black Panthers outside of a courthouse in Oakland, Calif., in 
1968. Credit... Ernest K. Bennett /Associated Press

--------------------
Live-action politics
--------------------

As a couple, Don Harris and Shyamala Gopalan Harris stood out, with their 
upper-crust accents and air of intellectual confidence, their contemporaries 
said. Anne Williams, 76, who was still in her teens when they met, found Mr. 
Harris “reserved and academic in his presentation,” difficult to get to know. 
Ms. Gopalan was “warm” and “charming.”

“You could tell she was ‘for the people,’ quote unquote, even though she had an 
aura of royalty about her,” she said. “Here was a woman, deeply brown, and yet 
she could have flowed from one set to another in terms of race.”

Baron Meghnad Desai, 80, an Indian-born economist, recalls meeting the couple 
on the steps of a house as they all made their way in to a dinner party. In 
those days, he said, “we were an argumentative lot. We could argue about 
politics in many countries.”

Ms. Gopalan Harris was a passionate debater, “fiery and radical but not Marxist 
in any sense.” Her husband, he
recalled, “did take a serious interest in radical political economy, but he was 
a calm and patient arguer.”

“There was no doubt about that, they were very much together, very much in 
love,” he said.

In those days, colonial powers were crumbling in all directions. In 1960, 17 
African nations gained independence. The same year, Fidel Castro was received 
with open arms in Harlem ( 
https://newrepublic.com/article/131793/castro-came-harlem ) , where he met with 
Malcolm X, Soviet Premiere Nikita Khrushchev and Prime Minister Jawaharlal 
Nehru of India.

“We did think all sorts of possibilities were there,” Mr. Desai said. 
“Governments were falling and left-wing governments were taking over. It was 
really moving and shaking stuff.”

Image

Ms. Gopalan at a civil rights protest in Berkeley, Calif. Credit... Kamala 
Harris campaign, via Associated Press

Many in their circles saw a link between the civil rights struggle and 
independence movements outside the country, said Mr. LaBrie, a member of the 
study group who became a lifelong family friend.

“It was just kind of a seamless flow between civil rights and those who 
supported the Cuban revolution,” the Congolese independence leader Patrice 
Lumumba and the Algerian revolution, Mr. LaBrie said. “There was an easy flow. 
People weren’t labeling themselves.”

In 1963 and 1964, five members of the group joined a trip to Cuba ( 
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1963/06/25/81816035.html?pageNumber=8
 ) organized by the Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, in defiance of a 
State Department travel ban, to see how Afro Cubans lived under Fidel Castro’s 
government. Ms. Williams and another member, James L. Lacy, recalled first 
hearing about the trip at a gathering organized by the Harrises.

“Those of us who called ourselves nationalists, we were very much encouraging 
the people of Cuba and South America and Central America to do what they were 
doing,” said Mr. Lacy, 85, a retired professor.

Mr. Harris said he did not recall taking part in any activism around Cuba, 
which could have jeopardized their immigration status. “We were certainly very 
much aware of, and scrupulously careful about following, the rules and 
regulations governing our role as foreign students,” he wrote.

Protests around civil rights, however, were a big part of the young couple’s 
life. In her speech at the Democratic National Convention ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/kamala-harris-dnc-speech.html ) 
last month, Senator Harris 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.”

For foreign students — many coming from countries with strong left-wing student 
movements — the rise in activism made them feel at home, said the Indian 
economist Amartya Sen, 86, who was teaching at Berkeley at the time and 
befriended the couple.

“Suddenly, America felt less like an alien country,” said Mr. Sen, who went on 
to win the Nobel Prize in 1998. “Now they had a lot of friends, and they were 
growing roots.”

Image

Mr. Harris with his daughter Kamala in 1965. Credit... Kamala Harris campaign, 
via Associated Press

-------------------------------
‘Those ties became the village’
-------------------------------

By the time the couple’s first child, Kamala, was born in 1964, political tides 
had begun to shift again.

White students had jumped into protest with both feet, rejecting the 
establishment and the old-fashioned mores of the 1950s. Support for third-world 
liberation was giving way, gradually, to demands for the political right of 
free speech. In 1966, seemingly out of nowhere, an actor named Ronald Reagan 
awakened a sleepy conservative electorate ( 
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/dallek-right.html ) 
and defeated California’s Democratic governor.

The Harrises’ marriage would fray as Mr. Harris took short-term teaching 
positions at two different universities in Illinois. When he won a tenure-track 
position at the University of Wisconsin, Ms. Gopalan Harris settled, instead, 
with her children in Oakland and West Berkeley.

The break was apparent to their 5-year-old daughter.

In “The Truths We Hold,” her 2018 memoir, Senator Harris wrote, “I knew they 
loved each other very much, but it seemed like they had become like oil and 
water.”

She wrote that “had 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.”

Mr. Harris’s career would flourish. A left-wing critic of neoclassical economic 
theory, he was a popular professor ( 
https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1976/11/03?page=4&section=MODSMD_ARTICLE11 ) 
, and became the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics 
department ( https://web.stanford.edu/~dharris/professional_career.htm ). But a 
deep freeze had settled in the marriage.

Ms. Gopalan Harris, a research scientist ( 
https://bcaction.org/2009/06/21/in-memoriam-dr-shyamala-g-harris/ ) who 
published ( 
https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=27537248&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjQyMzIxMzgzMiwiaWF0IjoxNTk5OTEzMjQ2LCJleHAiOjE1OTk5OTk2NDZ9.lN91a31J7ti2Ak9cYGzkySwrfKSWONJ_RbBOqQFPAK8
 ) influential work ( https://www.pnas.org/content/95/2/696.full ) on the role 
of hormones in breast cancer, filed for divorce in 1972. The split left her so 
angry that, for years, she barely interacted with Mr. Harris. Senator Harris 
has recalled that, when she invited both her parents to her high school 
graduation, she feared that her mother would not show up.

“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,” said her brother, Mr. 
Balachandran. “When you love somebody, then love turns into very hard 
bitterness, you don’t even want to talk to them.”

Mr. Harris has since ( 
https://www.jamaicaglobalonline.com/kamala-harris-jamaican-heritage/ ) 
expressed frustration ( 
https://www.nytimes.com/article/kamala-harris-dad-don-harris.html ) at custody 
arrangements that, he said, brought his close contact with his daughters to “an 
abrupt halt.” His daughter has made little mention of him during the campaign, 
and he has declined previous interviews, explaining that “the celebrity-seeking 
business is not my thing, and I have tried hard to keep out of it.”

“He was not around after the divorce,” Meena Harris, Senator Harris’s niece, 
told The New Yorker ( 
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/kamala-harris-makes-her-case ). 
“Their experience and relationship with blackness is through being raised in 
these communities in Berkeley and Oakland, and not through the lens of being 
Caribbean.”

Image

Kamala Harris with her mother Shyamala, center, her sister Maya, bottom left, 
and her maternal grandparents, P.V. and Rajam Gopalan, in 1972. Credit... via 
Joe Biden campaign

Into the vacuum stepped Ms. Gopalan Harris’s old friends, connections from the 
Berkeley study group.

She was a single, working mother of two ( 
https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=27537248&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjQyMzIxMzgzMiwiaWF0IjoxNTk5OTEzMjQ2LCJleHAiOjE1OTk5OTk2NDZ9.lN91a31J7ti2Ak9cYGzkySwrfKSWONJ_RbBOqQFPAK8
 ) , far from her family. Not until her oldest daughter was in high school 
could she afford a down payment on her own home, something she desperately 
wanted, Senator Harris wrote in her memoir.

A web of support — from day care, to church, to godparents and piano lessons — 
radiated out from the Afro American Association.

“Those ties became the village that supported her in rearing the children,” 
said Ms. Dashiell, the sociology professor who was a member of the discussion 
group. “I don’t mean financially. They surrounded those children.”

Mr. LaBrie introduced Ms. Gopalan Harris to his aunt, Regina Shelton, who ran a 
day care center in West Berkeley. ( 
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shelton's+Primary+Education+Center/@37.8650869,-122.2873057,3a,75y,355.25h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sqM0zwgCSthz7m7SMBimAUw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DqM0zwgCSthz7m7SMBimAUw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D355.24728%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x0:0xb0addf314d88a391!2sShelton's+Primary+Education+Center!8m2!3d37.8652444!4d-122.2873201!3m4!1s0x0:0xb0addf314d88a391!8m2!3d37.8652444!4d-122.2873201
 ) Mrs. Shelton, who had been born in Louisiana, became a pillar of the young 
family’s life, eventually renting them an apartment upstairs from the day care 
center.

Ms. Gopalan Harris often worked late ( 
https://www.newspapers.com/image/?clipping_id=27537248&fcfToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJmcmVlLXZpZXctaWQiOjQyMzIxMzgzMiwiaWF0IjoxNTk5OTEzMjQ2LCJleHAiOjE1OTk5OTk2NDZ9.lN91a31J7ti2Ak9cYGzkySwrfKSWONJ_RbBOqQFPAK8
 ) , recalled Carole Porter, 56, a childhood friend of Senator Harris, and had 
high expectations for her daughters.

“Shyamala didn’t play,” she said. “Being an immigrant, five feet tall, and 
having an accent — when things like that happen to you, and you face stuff, 
that toughens you up.”

But there was always a snack and a hug at Mrs. Shelton’s. If it got too late, 
the sleepy children would go to bed at her house, or Mrs. Shelton would send 
her daughters to tuck them in at home. One of Senator Harris’s favorite stories 
from childhood is of preparing a batch of lemon squares with salt instead of 
sugar; Mrs. Shelton, her face puckered, said they were delicious ( 
https://www.bustle.com/p/without-this-woman-i-wouldnt-be-the-senator-i-am-today-15910352
 ).

On Sunday mornings, Mrs. Shelton would take the girls to the 23rd Avenue Church 
of God ( 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/harris-brings-baptist-interfaith-roots-to-democratic-ticket/2020/08/12/2d319e6a-dc57-11ea-b4f1-25b762cdbbf4_story.html
 ) , a Black Baptist church. This, Ms. Porter said, was what Shyamala wanted 
for them.

“She raised them to be Black women,” Ms. Porter said. “Shyamala really wanted 
them to have both.”

Ms. Dashiell said she was certain that some influence of the study group 
survived in the Harris children.

“The thinking within the association was deep,” she said. “You would look at, 
what are the underlying causes of the problems that we find ourselves in as 
Black people? And that is something that would have translated, through these 
families, to Kamala.”

In the years since, Senator Harris has often reflected that her immigrant 
mother’s chosen family ( 
https://www.bustle.com/p/without-this-woman-i-wouldnt-be-the-senator-i-am-today-15910352
 ) — Black families one generation removed from the segregated South — 
powerfully shaped her as a politician. When she took the oath of office to 
become California’s attorney general, and then a U.S. Senator, she asked to lay 
her hand on Mrs. Shelton’s Bible.

“In office and into the fight,” she wrote in an essay last year, “I carry Mrs. 
Shelton with me always.”

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