Mom Shamala Gopalan & Papadonald J. Harris
Shmara Gopalan was born in southern India in 1938, and Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica the same year.
According to The New York Times, they met in 1962 at the University of California, Berkeley, and while they completed their PhD from the Afro-American Association of Research Groups. They married the following year and welcomed their daughter Kamala Harris in 1964 and Maya Harris in 1967.
“They fell in love in most of that American way,” Harris said in a speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, “we marched together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
However, her parents later split up.
“We knew they loved each other so much, but they looked like oil and water,” Harris wrote in her book The Truths. “By the time I was five, the bond between them had given way under the weight of incompatibility.”
After the divorce, Harris said while her father wrote that he “continued to be a part of our lives” she said, “It was really my mother who was in charge of raising us.”
After working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford and is Professor Emeritus, a professor of economics at the school.
Shamara, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 70, was a breast cancer researcher. The effects of breast cancer said that her work “segregating and characterizing the progesterone receptor genes has changed the healthcare facility’s understanding of the hormone responsiveness of breast tissue.”
