Taking the stage Wednesday in her first appearance beside Biden as his running mate, Harris invoked her mother’s memory, saying she always responded to gripes with a challenge.
“She’d tell us, ‘Don’t sit around and complain about things. Do something.’ So I did something,” Harris said Wednesday in her first appearance with Biden as his running mate.
Making clear the feeling of loss despite the buoyancy of the biggest moment of her professional life, Harris tweeted Thursday: “I dearly wish she were here with us this week.”
Harris’ parents met as doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley at the dawn of the 1960s. Her father, Donald Harris, studied economics. Her mother — Shyamala Gopalan — studied nutrition and endocrinology.
For two freethinking young people drawn to activism, they landed on campus as protests exploded around civil rights, the Vietnam War and voting rights. Their paths crossed in those movements, and they fell in love and married.
Gopalan Harris defied generations of tradition by not returning to India after getting her doctorate, tossing aside expectations of an arranged marriage. She gave birth to Kamala and then Maya two years later. Harris’ parents continued their advocacy.
In her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” she writes of her parents being sprayed with police hoses, confronted by Hells Angels and once, with the future senator in a stroller, forced to run to safety when violence broke out.
A few years into the marriage, Harris’ parents divorced. The mother’s influence on her girls grew even greater, and friends of Harris say they see it reflected throughout her life.
Andrea Dew Steele remembers it being apparent from the moment they sat down to craft the very first flyer for Harris’ first campaign for public office.
“She always talked about her mother,” Dew Steele said. “When she was alive she was a force, and since she’s passed away she’s still a force.”
Joe Gray, who was Gopalan Harris’ boss at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was a cancer researcher, struggles to describe how a woman who was just 5-foot-1 managed to fill a room with her commanding presence. He’s struck by how much Harris reminds him of her.