Her India born mother “believed in an America where moments like this are possible.”
Rising higher than any other woman in American politics ever before, Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, smashed the glass ceiling to be elected vice president of the United States.
Scripting history yet again, the senator from California who is used to breaking breaking new ground scored a series of firsts with her victory Saturday with the election of Democrat Joe Biden as President.
She is the first woman, the first Indian-American woman, the first daughter of immigrants and the first Black woman, to be elected to a job said to be just a heartbeat away from the world’s most powerful office.
“While I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last,” Harris said in a speech Saturday night in Wilmington, Delaware before introducing Biden. “Because every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities.”
“Every little girl watching across the country now knows they can do so, too,” said Harris, 56, recognizing women’s long struggle for the right to vote and break into top levels of American politics.
And to America’s children, she said, “regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourself in a way that others might not see you, simply because they’ve never seen it before. And we will applaud you every step of the way.”
READ MORE: Road to the White House
As she did at the time of accepting her nomination, Harris again fondly remembered her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who came from India as a young woman to pursue her dream of curing cancer.
“When she came here when she was 19, she could not have imagined this moment,” Harris said of her mother, who died in 2009. “But she believed in an America where moments like this are possible.”
“I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women — Black women, Asian, White, Latina and Native American women — throughout our nation’s history who have paved the way for this moment tonight,” she said.
“Women who fought and sacrificed so much for equality, liberty and justice for all, including the Black women, who are too often overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy.”
She wore a white suit, a nod to suffragettes 100 years after women’s constitutional right to vote was guaranteed.
“Tonight I reflect on their struggle, their determination, and the strength of their vision to see what can be, unburdened by what has been. And I stand on their shoulders,” Harris said.
She also thanked Biden for showing “the audacity to break one of the most substantial barriers that exist in our country and select a woman as his vice president.”
Harris was the fourth woman to appear on a major political party’s presidential ticket, following Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, Republican No. 2 Sarah Palin in 2008 and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016. She is the first to win.
READ: Kamala Harris effect galvanizes Indian American voters (October 14, 2020)
In his victory speech, Biden made a plea for unity and understanding asking supporters of President Donald Trump to give him a chance, and calling on all Americans to turn the page from what he described as a “grim era of demonization.”
After jogging on stage wearing a mask, Biden repeated his promise that he would seek to unify rather than divide. He pledged to govern by the creed that he does not see blue states and red states, but only the United States.
Long before Biden and Harris appeared on stage, jubilant celebrations erupted in big cities across America, with supporters pouring into the streets — shouting, chanting, singing, dancing and waving flags as drivers honked their horns — to mark the victory and the end of Donald Trump’s presidency.
The celebrations began near the White House on Saturday while Trump was golfing in Virginia. The president has given no sign he would invite Biden to the White House as he continues to maintain that the election was stolen from him.
While Trump has yet to give any public sign he’s prepared to relinquish power, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has approached him about conceding the election, CNN reported citing two sources.
Before running for America’s second highest office, Harris scripted history as California’s first Black attorney general and the first woman of South Asian heritage elected to the US Senate.
Chosen in August as Biden’s running mate, she recalled how Gopalan told Kamala growing up “Don’t sit around and complain about things, do something.” She has finally done a lot more than something.
Gopalan met Kamala’s would be father, Donald Harris, who had come from Jamaica to study economics at the University of California Berkeley.
“They fell in love in that most American way—while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” Harris then recalled.
Born on Oct, 20, 1964 in Oakland, California, then a hub for civil rights and anti-war activism, Harris got “a stroller’s-eye view of people getting into what the great John Lewis called ‘good trouble.’”
When she was five, her “parents split and my mother raised us mostly on her own” working “around the clock to make it work.”
“She made it look easy, though I know it never was,” Harris said. “My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives.”
Her mother, Harris said had “raised us to be proud, strong Black women, proud of our Indian heritage.”
She also taught Harris “to put family first” including “my uncles, my aunts—my chitthis” — as mother’s younger sister is affectionately called in her native Tamil — while looking at the “world beyond ourselves.”
Harris graduated from historically Black Howard University in Washington and earned a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law.
Starting her prosecutorial career in Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, she became the first Black woman elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney in 2003.
Seven years later, Harris became the first Black woman to be elected California Attorney General, overseeing the country’s second largest Justice Department, only behind the US Department of Justice.
Harris currently serves on the Senate committees on Intelligence, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs as also Judiciary.
Harris has been married to her husband Doug for the past six years. She is the stepmother of two children, Ella and Cole who she says are her “endless source of love and pure joy.”