Mother Shyamala Gopalan & Father Donald J. Harris
Shyamala Gopalan was born in South India in 1938 and Donald J. Harris was born in Jamaica the same year.
According to New York Timesthey met in 1962 while pursuing their doctorates at the University of California, Berkeley and as members of the Afro American Association study group. They married the following year and welcomed daughters Kamala Harris 1964 and Maya Harris in 1967.
“They fell in love in the most American way,” Harris said in his 2020 speech at the Democratic National Convention, “while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”
But her parents later split up.
“I knew they loved each other very much, but it seemed like they were going to be like oil and water,” Harris wrote in her book The truths we hold. “By the time I was five years old, the bond between them had given way under the weight of incompatibility.”
While Harris wrote that her father “remained a part of our lives” after the divorce, she noted “it was really my mother who took charge of our upbringing.”
After working as a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Donald joined Stanford and is a professor of economics, emeritus, according to his school biography.
Shyamala, who died in 2009 at the age of 70, was a breast cancer researcher. Breast Cancer Action noted her “work in isolating and characterizing the progesterone receptor gene changed the medical establishment’s understanding of breast tissue hormone sensitivity.”
