Sen. Kamala Harris, pictured in Washington, on July 10, 2018, grew up idolizing lawyers and saw them as the architects of Black Americans’ struggle for social justice.ERIN SCHAFF/The New York Times
Years before her time as U.S. Vice-President, Kamala Harris stood on the lawn of a Montreal apartment building and protested.
In 1977, her fight was for a local concern – the right for kids to play soccer on the grass. At age 13, the childhood demonstration with her younger sister, Maya, persuaded the building’s landlord to end the no-playing policy.
“I’m happy to report that our demands were met,” she recalled in her 2019 autobiography, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey.
As the daughter of a Black father and a South Asian mother, both of them academics who were heavily involved in social issues and the civil-rights movement, Ms. Harris had seen the power of protest and understood how it could change history. Her parents marched against the Vietnam War, for voting rights and against apartheid.
In 1976, when she moved to Montreal from Oakland, Calif., Quebec’s streets were alive with the rise of the Parti Québécois, and its vision for independence from Canada.
And while her story is very much an American one, the six years she spent in Canada as a teenager deeply influenced the course of her life. It was here that she set her sights on law school, determined to become a prosecutor after learning that her high-school best friend was being abused at home.
Ms. Harris, the likely nominee for the Democratic Party in the 2024 presidential election after President Joe Biden announced that he would not run again, grew up idolizing lawyers and saw them as the architects of Black Americans’ struggle for social justice.
She started on a career path in Montreal that would lead her to later focus on progressive issues – women’s rights, abortion, the environment and immigration – from inside the courtroom and through law, rather than out in the streets.
“When activists came marching and banging on the doors, I wanted to be on the other side to let them in,” she wrote in her memoir.
Before she was the Vice-President, Ms. Harris was a major force in the California Democratic Party. She became a U.S. senator in 2017. Prior to that, she was a courtroom prosecutor, then a San Francisco district attorney and then California attorney-general. In those roles, she cracked down on hate and environmental crimes, promoted gun control, opposed the death penalty and went after anti-abortion activists.
But she’s less known in other parts of the country. As she builds her national profile, she may have to address past reports in U.S. media that in her early days as Vice-President her office was plagued by poor communication, low morale, frequent staff departures and other dysfunction.
And she has less than four months before election day to persuade some voters to see past a new wave of personal attacks already being levelled at her, some of them gendered or racial.
“There is no stereotype for Kamala Harris,” said Eleni Kounalakis, California’s Lieutenant-Governor, who lobbied for Ms. Harris to be Mr. Biden’s running mate in 2019 and has known the presumptive presidential candidate for years through her involvement in San Francisco Bay area politics.
“Those of us who have worked with her know how smart and tenacious and hard-working and experienced she is. And it’s up to us to tell those stories, now that the rest of the country is going to get to see her and get to know her the way that we do.”
The contrast between Ms. Harris and Donald Trump “could not be greater,” Ms. Kounalakis said. While Mr. Trump says he wants to “be a dictator” for a day and his running mate says he would “ban abortion” (though Mr. Trump has said he opposes a federal abortion ban), the Vice-President is a “champion for women’s rights and women’s freedom” and “believes in democracy,” Ms. Kounalakis added.
If Ms. Harris wins the Democratic presidential nomination, which she is expected to do in the first week of August, voters will have to choose not only between competing visions for America, but starkly different personalities.
Mr. Trump, a wealthy, white 78-year-old, positions himself as an anti-intellectual, while Ms. Harris – nearly 20 years younger and the child of immigrants – was raised by intellectuals, in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Oakland and later Montreal. She plays chess, loves to cook and was politically active at an early age, while Mr. Trump’s passions, before entering politics late in life, leaned toward golf and real estate.
The Vice-President was deeply influenced by her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian-born biologist and breast-cancer researcher whom she mentions frequently in public speeches and in the anecdotes she tells to staff. Dr. Gopalan, who died in 2009, was known among colleagues as a strongly independent woman who was part of a small minority of female scientists in the 1970s and 1980s.
If you want to understand Ms. Harris’s political ideology, just look at her mother, say family members. In a letter to The Globe and Mail in 2019, Chinni and Shankar Subash, Ms. Harris’s aunt and uncle, who live in Mississauga, described Dr. Gopalan as a “strict no-nonsense disciplinarian” from a conservative, south Indian Tamil family, who pushed her daughters to perfectionism and to fight for social causes. They declined an interview.
Ms. Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, is a Stanford University professor of economics who came to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1961 and has since served as an economic adviser to several Jamaican prime ministers.
Ms. Harris’s parents separated when she was seven, after moving between university jobs in the Midwest and at the University of California, Berkeley. When the girls were in middle school, her mother moved them to Montreal, where Dr. Gopalan had landed a teaching job at McGill University and a research position at the Jewish General Hospital.
While Ms. Harris told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in a 2021 phone call that she “recalled fondly” her years in Montreal, the Vice-President didn’t initially love being in Canada. She arrived speaking hardly any French – the few words she knew were from her ballet classes – and her mother had enrolled her in Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a public school for French-speaking Quebeckers.
“It was not, however, an exciting opportunity for me. I was twelve years old, and the thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French-speaking foreign city covered in twelve feet of snow was distressing, to say the least,” she wrote in her memoirs.
Ms. Harris’s mother eventually let her transfer to a fine-arts school, where she began playing the violin, French horn and kettle drum. It was a difficult transition, but the Vice-President says that by the time she reached high school, she’d settled into life in Montreal.
She attended Westmount High School, an anglophone public school that counts Leonard Cohen and Stockwell Day as graduates. Classmates remember her as an outgoing teen who was drawn to the performing-arts crowd. She was part of the school’s pep club, and performed with a dance troupe to the music of Prince at local community centres and seniors’ centres.
It was during this time that her close friend, Wanda Kagan, moved in with Ms. Harris’s family for several months to escape abuse happening inside her home. During Ms. Harris’s campaign for Vice-President, she referenced that experience, saying it set her on a trajectory that focused on justice for ordinary people.
“When I was in high school, I had a best friend who I learned was being molested by her father,” she said. “One of the reasons I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her.”
Ms. Kagan declined an interview request, but told Dan Morain, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote a book about Ms. Harris in 2021, that the kindness showed by Ms. Harris and her family helped her through the toughest of times.
“The U.S. is getting the best version of the person, like that’s who she is. That’s who she always was,” Ms. Kagan said.
Ms. Harris wrote that she remained homesick for the U.S., and was determined to return there for college. After a year at Vanier College, a leafy CEGEP school in Montreal that includes former NDP leader Tom Mulcair among its alumni, she went to Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington.
As a lawyer with the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, she specialized in child sexual-assault cases. Over three decades as a prosecutor, she became known for aggressively pursuing homicide, burglary, robbery and domestic-abuse charges. She prioritized environmental protection as California’s first Black attorney-general, getting companies such as Volkswagen, Chevron and ConocoPhillips to pay billions in settlements.
As a U.S. senator, she pushed for higher taxes on corporations, federal legalization of cannabis and a plan to grant permanent residency to illegal immigrants.
Ms. Harris’s tough, prosecutorial style earned her national attention in 2018, with her pointed questioning of Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. She repeatedly went after Mr. Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault of a high-school classmate in 1982, and tried to get him to share his opinion on abortion.
“Can you think of any laws,” she asked Mr. Kavanaugh, “that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?”
Mr. Kavanaugh was stumped, and Ms. Harris had made her point.