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A confident young girl. A tough boss. An empathetic prosecutor. At times, slow to make decisions. A “consummate college student” with a wry sense of humor.
These are some of the ways the people in Vice President Kamala Harris’ life remember her before she became a household name in Washington — people who shared many laughs, lunches, conversations and school bus rides with the likely Democratic nominee for president of the United States.
Today, Harris is faced with the shortest presidential campaign in modern U.S. history after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race in mid-July.
Her Republican opponent, Donald Trump, has been in the national spotlight for decades, including as the former president.
So All Things Considered spoke with five people who knew Harris well during various chapters of her life to better understand what makes her the person she is today.
A multicultural upbringing among activists and leaders
As first-grader Carole Porter waited for the bus that would take her from their Berkeley, Calif., neighborhood to a desegregated public school nearby, she met a little girl named Kamala Harris. Struck by her kindness and confidence, Porter remembers becoming fast friends. They played together in the streets of their multicultural neighborhood.
“It was really a vast range of people. Mayor Warren Widener, the first Black mayor [of Berkeley], lived across the street from us, we had two Oakland Raiders on our block, and Huey Newton visited us regularly,” Porter says.
Porter believes growing up around two strong women shaped Harris.
She and Harris spent a lot of time together at the daycare beneath the home of Harris’ mother, which was run by the neighborhood matriarch, Regina Shelton. Shelton educated Harris about Black culture, including by taking Kamala and her sister Maya to church, and by teaching them how to cook soul food.
At the same time, Harris’ mother Shyamala Gopalan ensured that her daughters visited India every other year, and their grandparents would visit California in alternate years. Porter remembers Harris taking her to the family home in Berkeley on one such visit. “Her grandparents were in the window and she wanted me to wave at [them]," Porter says. "She’s very proud of her Indian heritage, her family, her name. And she always corrected people on how to pronounce her name.”
Porter’s younger sister and Harris’ younger sister, Maya, both became pregnant as teenagers around the same time. “It was a beautiful time, and it was a very challenging time,” says Porter, who recalls both families becoming deeply involved in raising the two babies. “That’s what we do in our communities — is we raise and we lift up and we take care of our own.”
Both Regina Shelton and Shyamala Gopalan have since died. Porter tears up as she thinks about Shelton and Gopalan seeing Harris run for the highest office in the land. She says their community’s collective pride isn’t just about the chance that Harris could become president. “It’s about having the opportunity to share some really strong, deeply rooted, important values and beliefs with other people that she was raised with, that we were raised with in this little redlined neighborhood in Berkeley, California. Who knew?”
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An early education in ambition
It was an “electric” time at Howard University when Harris was in college, according to her sorority sister, Jill Louis. In the 1980s, anti-apartheid demonstrations took hold at campuses across the nation, including Howard, a historically Black university located in Washington, D.C.
“We were highly focused on the impact we could have. We were the first generation to have the opportunities provided by not being born into legal segregation,” Louis says.
That kind of atmosphere, Louis says, drove her peers, including Harris, to be highly ambitious and focused. “We actually dressed up to go to school. Kamala carried a briefcase.” That wasn’t unusual at Howard at the time, “Because we were about our business, the business of achieving that education and being able to move forward.”
Harris and Louis both protested at the South African embassy. But Louis remembers that even then, Harris was “polite” in her activism. “She is always about the rule of law. We weren’t there to be disruptive or just defacing or to be outside the bounds of expressing our constitutional rights,” she says.
Louis says the people they surrounded themselves with — including their fellow members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority — were all highly ambitious. Many are now lawyers, school leaders and university executives. “None of us were shrinking violets,” Louis says. At the same time, the world was only just opening up opportunities to young, Black women, like them. “And so I compliment her for having a vision bigger than anything any of us had ever seen.”
Surrounded by women who were “firsts”
In 2000, Louise Renne was on the hunt for a prosecutor who could be both firm and empathetic. At the time, Renne was the San Francisco city attorney and needed someone to lead her office’s Family and Children's Services Division.
“What happens within the confines of a family and child requires a certain toughness to deal with, but also somebody who was kind and compassionate,” Renne says.
She hired lawyer Kamala Harris for the job. The first time Harris was overseeing adoptions for the court, Renne recalls she rushed into her office with an armful of teddy bears to distribute to families as a token of that day. It hadn’t been done before, and Renne says, “I thought it was certainly an indication of an out-of-the-box look at what would be a very meaningful day in the life of the child and the family making the adoption.”
Renne was the first woman in San Francisco to lead the City Attorney’s office, and she says it’s no surprise that Harris has gone on to become the first Black and South Asian woman to hold many of her public offices. After all, she came up in a working environment where she was surrounded by the likes of Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, the first pair of women to represent any state as senators, and Nancy Pelosi, who would go on to become the first female speaker of the House.
Not only were they “firsts,” says Renne, but they were “substantive, policy-driven, public-spirited, practical people.”
An expectation of excellence under all circumstances
Since her teenage years, Lateefah Simon was committed to making systemic change from the outside — as an activist. By the time she was 19 years old, she was running an organization that served young women in the criminal justice system.
That’s when she met Kamala Harris, who was working for the San Francisco City Attorney’s office at the time. They were serving on a taskforce together to change city policy and stop charging young victims of sex trafficking with crimes.
“I really believed in her. The young women that I worked with believed in her. But never in a million years did I think that I would work for her,” Simon says.
A few years later, when Harris became San Francisco’s first female district attorney, she pursued Simon for a job in her office. Simon declined the offer a few times, but recalls Harris telling her, “You can either carry this bullhorn on your back for the rest of your life, demanding that elected officials work for you and the young people that you care about, or you can become a part of my team, and we can actually deconstruct some of these inequities.”
Simon went on to work for Harris for several years, and remembers her as a boss with high expectations. On Simon’s first day, the new employee arrived “dressed down” in casual clothes, and Harris sent her home saying, “You are being paid by the very victims and survivors through tax dollars to represent them in this role. You will come with everything that you have every day.”
The next day, when Simon returned, expecting to be fired for not procuring professional clothes, Harris pulled a suit out from behind her desk that happened to be Simon’s size. “We lift as we climb,” Harris told Simon, “I sent you home so you understood that this is big government, and government is not the enemy, it is the prize.”
With Harris’ encouragement, Simon went on to earn a college degree. Simon is now running for Congress and still considers the vice president a mentor today.
A leader aware of their place in history
Over a decade ago, President Barack Obama visited the San Francisco Bay Area for a Democratic Party fundraiser, where he paid a joking compliment to California’s attorney general at the time, Kamala Harris. He said she was “by far, the best-looking attorney general in the country,” which drew national accusations of sexism.
Gil Duran was the man tasked with managing the fallout as Harris’ communications director at the time. Duran remembers Harris’ response as “graceful and tactful,” which represented a leadership quality he saw throughout his short time as a staffer for her.
But working for Harris wasn’t easy. Duran remembers his job interview as feeling like “being put on the stand” by a skilled prosecutor. “She was trying to ferret out whether I would break or crack under the pressure of the media and the press that would be coming her way shortly,” he says.
Harris has earned a reputation for having a high turnover of staff over her years as a public official. Duran left his job as her communications director after just five months. His on-the-record criticisms echo the complaints of some other former employees who will only speak anonymously.
While Duran says Harris assembled a team of highly competent people, he says he was often frustrated by how long she could take to make decisions. He describes her as someone who was exacting on certain details of cases but could struggle with other details. He recalls a boss with standards that were high without being clear.
“I found it hard to navigate a situation where it wasn't really clear to me how I could do a good job because doing the job in a way that had worked everywhere else didn't seem to work there,” he says.
At the same time, Duran acknowledges that that toughness may have come from the unequal pressures placed on Harris. “I think she's very aware of her place in history,” he says, “And I think she felt that she would be held to a much, much higher standard than white or male politicians.”
Duran thinks that as Harris approaches her presidential candidacy, she should be scrutinized and held accountable for her policies and her leadership. He hopes she has learned from her last, failed campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for president, and from the challenges she has faced in her other roles as a public official. While he doesn’t see a future in which they work together again, he says, “I certainly hope to be able to criticize her when she's President Harris.”
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