by Dan Morain
Wanda Kagan and Kamala Harris were the best of friends in high school in Montreal, but as happens with teenage friendships, they lost touch after graduation. They reconnected in 2005. Kagan was watching when her friend appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show talking about her experience as California’s first Black woman to be elected as a district attorney.
Kagan called Harris and the two had a long conversation, catching up and reminiscing about their shared memories, including the time Kagan lived with Kamala, Maya, and Shyamala Harris. She was escaping abuse that was occurring at home.
In that conversation, Kagan said, Harris told her that she was inspired to become a prosecutor largely because of “what she went through with me.” She told Harris that living with the Harris family was one of the few good memories she had from those years. Kagan, who first told her story publicly to the New York Times, recalled that the Harris family cooked and ate dinner together. Usually, they were Indian dishes. She had never had good food like that. It was a special time for her. In the Harris home, Kagan wasn’t simply “a person staying in our house now.” She was welcomed as a member of the family. Shyamala insisted that she get counseling. Kagan’s experience was so profound that she named her daughter Maya. The story of that bond between teenage girls decades ago in Montreal would become a part of the 2020 presidential campaign.
Harris’s high school yearbook entry shows that she yearned to return to the United States. She described happiness as “making long distance phone calls,” and her cherished memory entry reads, “California, Angelo; summer ’80.” She’s smiling in her yearbook photo, and she soon would be entering her freshman year at Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C. In that yearbook entry, Harris encourages her sister: “Be Cool MA YA!” Maya would become Kamala Harris’s closest confidante as she rose in politics. Shyamala’s daughter pays homage to the force of nature that was her greatest source of inspiration: “Sp Thks to: My mother.”
2 That Little Girl
It is impossible to understand Harris without understanding the unique contradictions of California’s politics. There are many Californias. Some parts of the state are as conservative as the reddest parts of the nation. Others are among the nation’s most liberal. To leave a mark on its history, as Harris has, a politician must know how to navigate among all of them. Her ascent, as you will see, is largely due to her talent at doing just that.
But most of all, you have to understand California’s particularly contradictory record on race—a record that Harris would come to know intimately from the day she was born.
* * *
Election Day 1964 fell on November 3, two weeks after October 20, the day Shyamala Gopalan Harris gave birth to her first daughter. To the extent the new parents were paying attention to election results, and not their infant, Shyamala and Donald Harris would have seen a momentous turn of events that night. President Lyndon Johnson won in a landslide over Senator Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, and gained a mandate that for a time would help him expand his domestic policy of the Great Society and civil rights. He captured nearly 60 percent of California’s vote, the first time in sixteen years that a Democrat carried California.
Across San Francisco Bay, Willie Lewis Brown Jr., a thirty-year-old Black man, campaigning as a “responsible liberal,” won a state assembly race against an Irish American politician who had held the seat since 1940. Phillip Burton had won a congressional seat in a special election earlier that year. With Burton’s younger brother, John Burton, also winning an assembly seat, Brown became a charter member of the Burton political machine, later called the “Burton-Brown machine” and then, simply, “Willie Brown’s machine.” Whatever its name, the organization dominated San Francisco politics for decades to come.
Brown, the son of a maid and a waiter, grew up in Mineola, Texas, a separate and unequal town of 3,600 people eighty-four miles east of Dallas. He was seventeen in 1951 when he escaped the Jim Crow South and arrived in San Francisco wearing worn-out shoes and holding his possessions in a cardboard suitcase. His sole San Francisco contact was his uncle, Rembert “Itsie” Collins, a high-living gambler who wore silk suits and diamond rings and who taught Brown his first lessons about the city he would come to dominate.
Like Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris and so many others, Brown had come west in search of opportunity. That meant getting an education. Brown worked his way through San Francisco State College as a janitor and got his law degree at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, located in the city’s Tenderloin district. Then, as now, the Tenderloin was home to new Americans and broken souls who were down, out, and addicted. Unable to get a job in the downtown law firms, Brown represented clients who were accused of vice crimes. That would change in the ensuing decades, when he would become one of California’s most powerful politicians of the later decades of the twentieth century. Kamala Harris would see that up close in the years ahead. And she herself would learn how to manage the treacherous political dichotomies of the state her parents had adopted.
* * *
On that Election Day, California voters decided the fate of a ballot measure, Proposition 14, which gave property owners “absolute discretion” to sell or not sell to whomever they chose and sought to prohibit the state government from in any way dictating who property owners could sell to. Funded by real estate interests and apartment owners, the measure was a mere 270 words long. Its goal was simple, although not explicitly stated: White property owners should have the right to keep Black people out of suburban neighborhoods, a siren sounded many decades later by President Trump in the 2020 presidential campaign.
In the official voter guide that went to all California registered voters, Proposition 14’s backers made the argument: If the government could require owners to rent or sell to anyone who could pay the price, “what is to prevent the Legislature from passing laws prohibiting property owners from declining to rent or sell for reasons of sex, age, marital status or lack of financial responsibility?”
California attorney general Stanley Mosk, a liberal, took the opposite view: “It would legalize and incite bigotry. At a time when our nation is moving ahead on civil rights, it proposes to convert California into another Mississippi or Alabama and to create an atmosphere for violence and hate.”
Like many cities, Berkeley long had been carved in two, a legacy of redlining. People of color generally could not rent or buy houses to the east of Grove Street, now Martin Luther King Jr. Way. The hills to the east, with their eucalyptus and oak trees, were where White people lived. The Harris family rented in the flats.
Proposition 14 was a reaction to the Rumford Fair Housing Act. Signed by Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in 1963, the Rumford Fair Housing Act guaranteed people the right to rent where they wanted and banned discrimination in public housing. The legislation passed on the last night of the legislative session, after conservative senators watered it down by exempting single-family homes.
Its author, Assemblyman William Byron Rumford, represented the district that encompassed the Berkeley flats and West Oakland where the Harris family lived. Rumford, a pharmacist educated at the University of California, San Francisco, another public university, won his seat in 1948, the first Black legislator elected from the Bay Area.
Realtors saw California as the battleground for a national showdown over open housing, and they “felt that if in so-called ‘liberal’ California they could defeat this legislation, their chance of defeating it in other areas was very good,” Rumford said in an oral history.
The outcome wasn’t close.
On the day they voted overwhelmingly for LBJ and sent Willie Brown to Sacramento, Californians approved Proposition 14, 65 percent to 35 percent. Voters in fifty-seven of the state’s fifty-eight counties, including liberal San Francisco, voted for it. In Alameda County, where the Harris family lived, 60 percent of the voters approved it.
Proposition 14 would not stand. The California
Supreme Court struck it down in 1966, finding it violated the U.S. constitutional requirement that all citizens receive equal protection. On May 29, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that the ballot measure violated the Fourteenth Amendment by the narrowest of margins, 5–4.
Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas wrote separately: “This is not a case as simple as the one where a man with a bicycle or a car or a stock certificate or even a log cabin asserts the right to sell it to whomsoever he pleases, excluding all others whether they be Negro, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Catholics, Baptists, or those with blue eyes.” Rather, the issue involved “a form of sophisticated discrimination,” intended to keep neighborhoods White.
Quoting James Madison, Douglas wrote, “And to those who say that Proposition 14 represents the will of the people of California, one can only reply: ‘Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression.’ ”
Translation: The Constitution protects minorities against unbridled majority rule for good reason.
Dissenters cited the will of the people, contending courts should not second-guess legislators or, by extension, the people through the ballot on such matters.
Decades later, California attorney general Kamala Harris would use a variation of that argument when she advocated for marriage equality. But first and more directly, she would experience the outcome of a major showdown over race.
* * *
Berkeley school superintendent Neil V. Sullivan was the Harvard-educated son of a mother who knew that education was the ticket out of their Irish ghetto in Manchester, New Hampshire. He also was a leading proponent of school desegregation.
On behalf of the Kennedy administration, Sullivan spent 1963 working to reopen schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, after segregationists sought to evade integration orders by shutting down all public schools. Parents of White kids placed their children in special private schools. Black kids had no school. Sullivan’s job was tough. Townsfolk regularly dumped garbage on the steps and veranda of Sullivan’s rented house. There were bomb threats. Someone fired a shotgun through his window. But he managed to reopen the schools, and U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy visited Sullivan in Prince Edward County in 1964, after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.
“The children fell in love with him, and it was obvious that they gave him the psychological lift he so badly needed,” Sullivan later wrote.
Sullivan arrived in Berkeley in September 1964, having been recruited by the school board. It was dicey, initially. School board members were facing a recall over their efforts to integrate the schools, but they survived. That ensured Sullivan could carry out his mandate. In May 1967, Sullivan told the Berkeley School Board: “These schools shall be totally desegregated in September, 1968, and we might make history on that day.”
Sullivan chronicled his Berkeley experiences in a book, Now Is the Time, a reference to Martin Luther King Jr.’s exhortation at the March on Washington in 1963, “Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.”
Dr. King, who had become a friend, wrote in the foreward to Sullivan’s book, dated September 1, 1967, “I believe that our schools must and can take the lead in this mighty effort.” Dr. King, however, did not live to see the result.
In 1968, that year of the assassinations and civil uprising, Sullivan made good on his promise. Buses transported Black kids from the Berkeley flats to schools in the hills, and White kids rode buses to schools in the flats. Berkeley became the largest city in America to integrate its schools.
“Is it possible for one middle-sized city with the familiar array of white bigots capable of flooding the mails with hate literature, one city surrounded by cities full of racism—both white and black—to succeed?
“The answer in this city of Berkeley is a resounding ‘YES,’ ” Sullivan wrote.
Kamala Harris was not on those buses in 1968. She was too young. Nor did she ride on those buses in 1969, the year she entered kindergarten. That year, her parents enrolled her in a Montessori school in Berkeley.
But in the fall of 1970, that little girl did board a bus bound for first grade at Thousand Oaks Elementary, a 2.3-mile ride from her apartment. Before desegregation, 11 percent of Thousand Oaks’s students were Black. By 1970, more than 40 percent of the kids were Black.
“Whether or not we can change adults, we can change children. Our children will grow up in a community where justice is a way of life, and, we hope, they will spread justice,” Sullivan wrote. Sullivan’s sentiment was noble and aspirational, though clearly not simple.
* * *
A half century later, in the heat of a race for the presidency, Harris was determined to take Americans back to that moment in history. On the big stage at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Florida, U.S. senator Kamala Harris, the prosecutor turned politician and the daughter of a mother from India and a father from Jamaica, was not about to be silenced.
“I would like to speak on the issue of race,” the first-term senator from California said, breaking up the back-and-forth an hour into the first Democratic presidential primary debate in the race to unseat President Donald J. Trump.
One of the moderators, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, asked that she take no more than thirty seconds. Harris smiled and composed herself. What she had in mind on June 27, 2019, would take a little longer than a half minute.
She turned to Joe Biden, the former vice president and front-runner, a man twenty-two years her senior, from another generation. Harris started gently. She didn’t believe he was a racist, she said, with the implication hanging over the moment that perhaps he could be. Then she pivoted. In the past, Biden had sounded almost romantic about his days in the Senate, when politics were civil and he, a Delaware liberal, worked with Senators James O. Eastland of Mississippi and Herman E. Talmadge of Georgia, old Democrats, who were segregationists. The legislation they worked on sought to block busing to desegregate public schools. Harris called that “hurtful.”
“You know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris said in what became the debate’s signature line.
In the days ahead, Harris’s supporters and detractors would argue over whether the orchestrated attack was politically wise or below the belt, crass or a much-needed breakout moment for a candidate seeking to rise into the top tier of Democrats seeking the nomination for president of the United States. At a minimum, Kamala Harris had staked her claim as being the embodiment of a multicultural America and a direct beneficiary of hard-won policies that segregationists fought to prevent. Hand-wringing aside, the drama of the immediate political episode obscured the context of the era in which she was born.
The moment was intended to catapult Harris to front-runner status, cement her place with the Democratic base, particularly Black voters, and hobble Biden, the front-runner. It worked for a minute. Harris’s campaign seized on the moment, tweeting a photo of Harris as a young girl, her hair in pigtails tied with bows and an unsmiling look of determination on her face. Biden’s team was on the defensive. Harris’s campaign team sought to monetize the moment by selling T-shirts with the image of the girl in pigtails and the words THAT LITTLE GIRL WAS ME. Sales price: $29.99 to $32.99.
Harris entered the presidential race fully intending to win. To do that, she had to defeat the front-runner. That she fell short can be attributed to missteps by her and by factors beyond her control. But though her campaign sputtered and halted before the first votes were cast, Harris left a big impression. Something about her always cuts through.
That is Kamala Harris’s way.
3 An Education, Apartheid, and a Slaughter
On May 13, 2017, 150 years after Howard University’s founding and thirty-one years after she graduated, Senator Harris returned to her alma mater to deliver the commencement address. Harris, like many Howard a
lumni, is loyal to her alma mater and speaks of it with great affection. She talks of the great Howard graduates who came before her—author Toni Morrison, Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and many more. In her commencement speech, she dwelled on Howard University’s motto, Veritas et utilitas—truth and service. Without mentioning Donald Trump by name, she left no doubt who she was referring to.
“At a time when there are Americans, disproportionately black and brown men, trapped in a broken system of mass incarceration, speak truth and serve. At a time when men, women, and children have been detained at airports in our country simply because of the god they worship, speak truth and serve. At a time when immigrants have been taken from their families in front of schools and outside courthouses, speak truth and serve.”
Howard University occupies a unique place in American history, even more so now with Harris’s ascent. It was named after Oliver O. Howard, the Civil War major general who headed the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, and fought to ensure that the four million people who were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War would have the right to marry, own land, earn a living, vote, and get an education. Howard was to play an important role in educating teachers and others who would help formerly enslaved people gain their place in society.
President Andrew Johnson—who was anti-Black, drank heavily, and was given to conspiracy theories—signed the legislation creating Howard University on March 2, 1867. That was the same day that Congress overrode Johnson’s veto of the first Reconstruction Act, and a year before the House of Representatives impeached him. In a history of Howard University, Rayford W. Logan, a history professor for nearly thirty years at Howard, writes that given Johnson’s racist views, the decision to sign the act was “probably not altruistic.” Perhaps, he wrote, Johnson did not realize the significance of the bill he was signing.