Kamala Harris will be our first woman Vice President of the United States. Vice President elect Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California. Kamala graduated from Howard University, a historically Black University located in Washington, D.C. In 1989 she graduated from the University of California Hastings College of the Law and was admitted to the California Bar in 1990. Her career began as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County California District Attorney’s Office. She then moved on to the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office in 1988 where she became the chief of the Career Criminal Division. It was in this position that Kamala spoke out against Proposition 21 which would have allowed prosecutors the option of trying juveniles in Superior Court instead of in Juvenile Courts.

In 2000, Kamala went to work at the San Francisco City Hall where she ran the Family and Children’s Services Division representing child abuse and neglect cases.

In 2002, she ran for District Attorney of San Francisco. In this election she pledged to never seek the death penalty. She also said that she would never prosecute three-strike offenders unless the cases involved violent felonies.

In 2004, Kamala and Civil Rights activist Lateefah Simon created the Back on Track initiative, a very successful reentry program for first-time nonviolent offenders age 16 to 30.

In 2008, after the passage of Prop 8, a state constitutional amendment that stated that only marriages “between a man and a woman” are valid, Kamala and the attorney general’s office decided not to defend the marriage ban in court leading the Ninth Circuit to lift the stay on banning same-sex marriages

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In 2010, she was elected Attorney General of California. She was re-elected. In 2013, Kamala put into place the California Department of Justice’s Division of Recidivism and Re-Entry. This was done in partnership with district attorneys in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Alameda Counties.

In 2015, Kamala introduced “Principled Policing: Procedural Justice and Implicit Bias” training, helping officers to overcome barriers to neutral policing. Also, in 2015, under Kamala’s leadership, the California Department of Justice became the first statewide agency in the country to require officers to wear body cameras.

In 2016, Kamala was elected to the United States Senate. She is the second African American woman and the first South Asian American to serve in the United States Senate. Kamala has served on the Committee on the Budget, Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Select Committee on Intelligence, and the Committee on the Judiciary. She is a part of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues.

On August 11, 2020, Joe Biden announced he had chosen Kamala as his Vice-Presidential running mate. Then, after a forceful campaign, on November 7, 2020, news organizations called the race in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris making Kamala the Vice President-elect. The first Woman, the first Black woman, the first South Asian American woman serving as Vice President of the United States.

Politics aside, this is a wonderful moment in the history of our Nation. We will never achieve our ideals, as a Nation, until the walls of fear, exclusion, and injustice come tumbling down. Our Government is beginning to reflect the people of the Nation for the first time in a long time. This is a turning point in our history. May our political differences bring us together as we seek to work together for the benefit and well-being of all peoples.