Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  On November 7, 2020, the day Joe Biden declared victory in his long run for the presidency, Vice President–elect Kamala Harris stepped to the dais wearing white, in honor of the one hundredth year of women’s suffrage, and wearing pearl earrings in honor of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the nation’s first sorority created by and for Black women. Harris paid tribute to the women who came before her—Shirley Chisholm, Hillary Clinton, and many others—and became the living embodiment of the promise that any girl can become whatever she aspires to be so long as she has the talent and drive, and a measure of good fortune. Her rise is especially significant for her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, which was founded in 1908: members of that sorority and others that make up the “Divine Nine” sororities, founded by Black women, undoubtedly helped propel the Biden-Harris ticket.

  “Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination, and the strength of their vision to see what can be unburdened by what has been,” Harris told the crowd gathered in Wilmington, Delaware, and watching from around the nation and world. Many who watched are part of the Howard family.

  Karen Gibbs was watching from her home in suburban Washington, D.C. She and Harris lived next door to each other at Howard and became best of friends.

  “Pure exuberance, an abundance of pride and thankfulness,” Gibbs said, summing up what was going through her mind as she watched the godmother of her children. “I’ve been overwhelmed with emotion.”

  The university is a little less than a two-and-a-half-mile walk from the White House. It has produced mayors, senators, a Supreme Court justice, Nobel laureates, and now someone who will take her place in the White House. Harris, like others who chose to attend Howard, could have gone to some other top university. But she sought out a historically Black college because she would be respected for who and what she was, to be with people who looked like her, and as one not to the manor born, would not have to struggle for a place at the table.

  “It is finally Kamala who gets us there. You can’t help but feel so, so, so much joy and hope,” said Ron Wood, an attorney and prominent graduate of Howard, who watched her speech from his Los Angeles home.

  * * *

  Having grown up in Berkeley and Oakland and attended protests since she was a toddler, Kamala Harris fit right in at Howard University in the mid-1980s.

  “We would dance on Friday nights and we would protest on Saturday mornings,” Harris said of her days at Howard, in a presidential campaign video addressed to alumnae of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, specifically her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority sisters, a network of accomplished college-educated women. Harris writes in The Truths We Hold:

  On any given day, you could stand in the middle of the Yard and see, on your right, young dancers practicing their steps or musicians playing instruments. Look to your left and there were briefcase-toting students strolling out of the business school, and medical students in their white coats, heading back to the lab. Groups of students might be in a circle of laughter, or locked in deep discussion.… That was the beauty of Howard. Every signal told students that we could be anything—that we were young, gifted, and black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.

  Harris graduated with a degree in political science and economics in 1986. That year’s Howard University yearbook shows that Shirley Chisholm was honored for her career. Wynton Marsalis and Run-DMC performed. Younger students were upset that the national age for alcohol consumption had increased to twenty-one from eighteen in 1984, and Howard students were starting to use personal computers, which cost upward of $3,000. Students organized a boycott of Coca-Cola for doing business in White-ruled South Africa. On January 20, 1986, the nation for the first time celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke about King on that day at Howard.

  * * *

  Harris and Karen Gibbs shopped together, shared whatever bounty that came in care packages from home, regularly went with each other to worship at different churches in Washington on Sundays, and cooked together.

  “She used to laugh at my cooking. I ate bland,” Gibbs said.

  Harris visited Gibbs’s home in Delaware and Gibbs visited Harris’s in Oakland. Gibbs gave Harris the high compliment of inviting her to be godmother to her children. Harris was honored. To this day, Gibbs thinks of Shyamala Harris when she cooks a recipe that Shyamala taught her: green apples fried in butter and cinnamon. At Howard, Harris and Gibbs were focused on achieving their goals of becoming lawyers and prosecutors. Both did. “That is where we came of age, where we found out who we were. It was a flurry of excitement. There were so many people who were young, gifted, and Black,” Gibbs said. Senator Harris invited Gibbs to attend the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Her opinion of Harris’s performance was important to her old friend, as someone who often had questioned hostile witnesses herself. Gibbs thought the Kavanaugh questioning by Harris was masterful.

  * * *

  While at Howard, Harris got an internship in U.S. senator Alan Cranston’s office; she would go on to hold the seat Cranston once held. She also marched against apartheid. In a speech at Howard shortly after President Reagan’s reelection in 1984, the South African leader Bishop Desmond M. Tutu accused the Reagan administration of collaborating with South Africa to perpetuate racism in his homeland, the Associated Press reported on November 7, 1984. Tutu said U.S. policy under Reagan proved to be “an unmitigated disaster for blacks” in his homeland and that Reagan’s policy encouraged the regime to “increase its repressiveness” and “be more intransigent.”

  Back in Harris’s home state of California, people in positions of power were taking actions intended to topple the South African regime. An influential Republican played an outsized role in that effort.

  * * *

  For years, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, then an assemblywoman from Los Angeles, had been pushing legislation without success to force managers of California’s massive public employee pension fund to divest holdings in companies doing business in South Africa. California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown was helping in any way he could. In June 1985, Brown called on the University of California Board of Regents to divest the university’s pension fund holdings in South Africa. Although Brown was at the height of his power and could exert control over the university’s funding, the board rejected his request. Governor George Deukmejian, a Republican, agreed with that decision, at first.

  As students continued to protest apartheid, Brown went to work on the governor, making a point of bumping into Deukmejian where the governor ate lunch, the cafeteria in the basement of the capitol. Brown never would have eaten in the basement on his own. He preferred finer dining. Deukmejian was happy with tuna sandwiches on white bread. Tuna was one of Brown’s least favorite foods. The Speaker sacrificed his good taste for an important cause, writing in his autobiography, Basic Brown: “We talked of many things during those lunches, including the genocide of the Armenian people at the hands of the Turks in 1915—a horror that was present in Deukmejian’s life, since members of his own family had suffered terribly then. I pointed out the parallels between the condition of the Armenian people then and the black citizens of South Africa now.”

  Deukmejian’s position evolved. In mid-1986, Deukmejian’s chief of staff, Steven Merksamer, phoned the University of California chancellor to say that the governor was rethinking his opposition to divestment.

  Deukmejian then appealed to his friend President Reagan. No legislator had been closer to Reagan during his time as governor than Deukmejian. In a letter to President Reagan, Deukmejian urged that he “turn up the pressure against apartheid South Africa.” He signed the letter “Duke.”

  On July 16, 1986, Deukmejian wrote to the regents: “We must not turn our backs on black South Africans at this moment of great crisis. As the world’s seventh largest economy, California can make a difference. We must stand up for freedom and stand up against violations of
human rights wherever they occur.”

  Two days later, with Deukmejian in attendance, the regents reversed their position and voted to divest billions in pension fund holdings in companies doing business in South Africa.

  In Sacramento, Assemblywoman Waters reintroduced legislation in 1986 to force state pension funds to sell their holdings in companies operating in South Africa. Major businesses, Deukmejian’s main source of political support, lobbied hard against the legislation. But the legislature passed it, with Republican votes. On the day he signed Waters’s bill, Deukmejian raised the question he’d been asking himself: “How would we feel if our rights and if our individual freedoms were denied and the rest of the world turned its back on us?”

  If Harris was paying attention to the events back home, she would have seen that actions taken in Sacramento matter. California was again proving that it could lead a movement, if not a nation. Nelson Mandela, for one, noticed.

  In 1990, the year Harris started working as an Alameda County prosecutor, South African authorities freed Mandela after twenty-seven years in prison. In June, Mandela made a triumphal appearance before sixty thousand people chanting “freedom, freedom” at the Oakland Coliseum. On that stop in Oakland, Mandela praised the California political leaders who had pressured South Africa by fighting for divestment.

  “I don’t think there was anything we did that had more of a worldwide impact,” Brown said years later. “We brought the key to the jail for Nelson Mandela.”

  * * *

  Shyamala had returned to Oakland with Maya, having gotten a research position in Berkeley. Kamala decided to come home, too. Her next stop was the UC Hastings College of the Law, in downtown San Francisco.

  She entered law school in 1987. That was the year after California voters ousted three liberal California Supreme Court justices in a campaign led by Deukmejian. Deukmejian replaced the three Democratic appointees with conservatives, giving Republican appointees a majority on the court that would stand for the next three decades.

  Harris’s law class produced numerous lawyers who went on to much success. One, McGregor Scott, became U.S. attorney in Sacramento under Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump. Another, J. Christopher Stevens, joined the U.S. Foreign Service and was appointed U.S. ambassador to Libya by President Obama in 2012. Stevens died when terrorists attacked the consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Harris became president of Hastings’s Black Law Students Association. But people who knew her there say she was not a standout. She did not graduate summa cum laude, magna cum laude, or cum laude.

  “There was nothing about her that would suggest that she would one day become district attorney, or attorney general, or senator, or vice president,” said San Francisco attorney Matthew D. Davis, a classmate, friend, and campaign supporter.

  * * *

  Kamala Harris was finishing her time at Hastings when on January 17, 1989, California and the nation learned of a new kind of hell.

  Patrick Purdy, a hate-filled young man wearing combat fatigues and wielding an AK-47 assault weapon of war, took aim at children on the playground at Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton. By the time he was finished firing 106 rounds, five children were dead and twenty-nine others were wounded, as was a teacher. Parents of nearly all the victims had left the strife of Southeast Asia for the freedom promised in America. Purdy, who shot himself in the head, wasn’t the first gunman to carry out a mass killing in the United States. But his special evil targeting children would be repeated at many more schools in the decades ahead.

  In Sacramento, about fifty miles to the north, Democratic legislators responded by reviving long-stalled legislation to ban assault weapons. Then attorney general John Van de Kamp, a proponent of gun control, already had established a task force to help shape the legislation. One of the advocates was Richard Iglehart, the chief assistant for the Alameda County district attorney. Iglehart provided expertise in shaping the legislation and, with others from law enforcement, garnering support for politicians worried about a backlash for supporting the bill. “We were able to hit the ground running,” Iglehart said at the time.

  Governor Deukmejian was elected in 1982 in no small part because his Democratic opponent, former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, supported an initiative on the ballot that year that would have imposed strict gun control. So Deukmejian was not the sort to readily sign gun control legislation. But as he neared the end of his time in elective office, the Stockton slaughter shook him.

  “You do not grieve alone,” Deukmejian said, addressing two thousand people at the children’s funeral, which was conducted in four languages. Willie Brown was there and saw the governor tear up. “Your sorrow is our sorrow. Your pain is our pain. This terrible tragedy has shocked and greatly saddened the people of this state.”

  Deukmejian decided that assault weapons had to be restricted. Despite intense lobbying by the NRA and Gun Owners of California, the legislature answered with what would be the first measure in the nation to ban assault weapons. Four months after the slaughter at Cleveland Elementary School, Deukmejian signed the bill:

  “These bills are not going to bring back the lives of the five beautiful young children who died so tragically on the school grounds in Stockton, but we hope and pray that these measures, along with the others that we are seeking, will help our brave and courageous law enforcement community.”

  The new law was far from perfect. Because it banned specific models, gunmakers made small modifications and continued selling their deadly wares. But in California, the 1989 assault weapons ban marked the beginning of the gun advocates’ decline. In 2000, the NRA’s political action fund spent $373,000 on California campaigns. By 2010, the year Harris was elected California attorney general, the NRA reported spending zero on California campaigns. It would have been a waste of money. The vast majority of California voters had come to support strong gun control.

  In the years ahead, the legislature tightened the law so that rapid-fire assault weapons that hold more than ten rounds are illegal in California. Other laws require background checks for all gun purchases, restrict the sale of cheap handguns, deny guns to people who have a history of alcohol abuse or domestic violence, prohibit guns on university campuses, limit the number of guns people can buy in a given month, and allow ammunition sales only to people who are legally entitled to own guns. There are many more restrictions.

  Kamala Harris was learning early in her career about the brutal reality of guns in the wrong hands. As a prosecutor, she would be an aggressive enforcer of the California laws that seek to keep guns away from people who should not have them.

  4 A Taste of Politics

  Prosecutors know they are not meant to see the finer side of life. Even so, the criminal world of Alameda County stood out. In 1990, when Kamala Harris, rookie prosecutor, walked through the door of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, the number of murders in the county seat of Oakland reached a record 146, exceeding the record set the year before. And it reached a new height in 1992 when there were 165. A few years earlier, a horse-drawn funeral procession for a drug kingpin, who was murdered in prison, wended its way through the length of Oakland and drew one thousand mourners.

  On some mornings, people waiting to handle their traffic infractions would stand in a line that snaked around the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse, a utilitarian building named for a son of Oakland who became the first Black California Supreme Court justice. A bridge connects the courthouse to the Oakland Police Department headquarters and Alameda County jail. The criminal justice complex is hard by the freeway that skirts the east shore of San Francisco Bay, not far from where the double-deck Cypress Structure freeway pancaked onto itself in the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, killing forty-two of the sixty-three people who died in that temblor.

  This was where Deputy District Attorney Kamala Harris, twenty-five-year-old daughter of high-minded Berkeley intellectuals, began her career, after passing the notoriously tough Cali
fornia State Bar exam on her second try.

  In her presidential campaign kickoff speech thirty years later, Harris explained her decision to become a prosecutor: “I knew that the people in our society who are most often targeted by predators are also most often the voiceless and vulnerable.”

  Harris would walk through the courthouse doors and climb the stairs to the second floor where the district attorney’s warren of offices was located, or, if she was so inclined, ride an elevator with jurors, defendants, witnesses, and defense lawyers. Cops would catch a few minutes of sleep before having to testify. As many as five trials would be in progress. Alpha Kappa Alpha was a world away.

  As a law student in 1988, Harris worked as an Alameda County District Attorney’s Office law clerk, a coveted job because clerks would gain courtroom experience and get paid. The office’s storied history is a draw for ambitious young lawyers. Earl Warren, a California governor and chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was an Alameda County district attorney. President Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese III, came from the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. So did California Supreme Court justices Ming Chin and Carol A. Corrigan. At noon, Harris and other young lawyers would bring brown bags to the law library, where senior prosecutors would describe cases and offer pointers on trial strategies.

  “She did stand out a bit from the crowd. She had a different confidence,” Alameda County district attorney Nancy O’Malley, then one of Harris’s supervisors, said. Harris was energetic, willing to take tough cases, laser focused, driven to be successful. She knew early where to get the education she needed. “She paid very close attention when old-timers were talking.”