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Kamala Harris

Where did Kamala Harris grow up? A timeline

Portrait of George Fabe Russell George Fabe Russell
USA TODAY NETWORK

Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris was born in the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1964.

Her birth certificate shows that her parents were living in Berkeley at the time, just blocks from the University of California-Berkeley, where her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, graduated with a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology the same year in pursuit of becoming a cancer researcher.

Her father, Donald Harris, also earned a graduate degree, in economics, from UC-Berkeley and had a long career in academia.

The two met there in 1962 in a study group focused on civil rights activism, a community that they were both deeply involved in and passionate about. They were married the next year.

Kamala’s sister, Maya, was born in 1966.

When the future vice president was a child, her family moved around often, as is common for early-career academics.

Harris’ father was hired at the University of Illinois in 1966 and they moved to Urbana, Illinois, for a year.

From 1967 to 1968, they lived in Evanston, Illinois, where Donald Harris taught at Northwestern University.

In 1968, they moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where he taught and she did cancer research at the University of Wisconsin.

Kamala Harris would go to visit her father’s family in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, and her mother’s, in Chennai, India.

Her parents separated while they were living in Madison and Shyamala returned to California with the two girls in 1970.

Donald Harris remained in Madison until 1972, when he left to teach economics at Stanford University, where he remained until 1998 and is now a professor emeritus.

Once both her parents were living in California again, Harris and her sister would live with her father in Palo Alto on the weekends.

During the week, they lived with their mother in Berkeley. The apartment above a daycare in the yellow house on Bancroft Way was featured in childhood photos in some of the videos shown at the Democratic National Convention this week.

A photo of Maya Harris and Kamala Harris is shown on screen as Maya Harris speaks during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center.

The “flatlands” area of West Berkeley where Shyamala and her daughters lived was a predominately Black neighborhood. “From almost the moment she arrived from India,” Harris wrote in her memoir “The Truths We Hold,” “she chose and was welcomed to and enveloped in the black community.”

Kamala was bussed a few miles away to Thousand Oaks Elementary School as California schools were being desegregated.

In 1976, Shyamala got a job at Jewish General Hospital conducting breast cancer research and teaching at the McGill University medical school in Montreal, Canada.

Kamala and Maya would go back to California to stay with their father during school breaks.

In francophone Quebec, Kamala attended a French-language elementary school and an English-language high school. She wrote in her memoir of being intensely homesick for California during that time.

She attended Vanier College in Montreal for a year before moving to Washington D.C. in 1982 to attend Howard University, where she graduated in 1986 with a bachelor’s in political science and economics. She was elected to the student council, active in the anti-apartheid movement, part of the debate team and a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

She returned to California to attend the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, in San Francisco, where she served as president of the Black Law Students Association and graduated with in 1989.

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