Kamala Harris, the current vice president-elect of the United States, on Monday shared a picture remembering her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris on her birthday.
“Thinking of my beloved mother today on her birthday,” she tweeted with a black and white picture of a young Shyamala Harris.
Kamala Harris created history as the first Black woman elected as vice president of the United States. In her victory speech after the elections, the 56-year-old had remembered her mother, calling her the “woman most responsible for my presence here today.”
{{/usCountry}}Kamala Harris created history as the first Black woman elected as vice president of the United States. In her victory speech after the elections, the 56-year-old had remembered her mother, calling her the “woman most responsible for my presence here today.”
{{/usCountry}}In the same address, she had also mentioned, “When she came here from India at the age of 19, maybe she didn’t quite imagine this moment, but she believed so deeply in an America where a moment like this is possible.”
“I’m thinking about her and about the generations of women... who have paved the way for this moment tonight,” Harris said, referring to her mother, who has found a reference often in her speeches.
Born in Chennai, Shyamala Gopalan Harris arrived in the United States in 1959, when she was 19 years old, after completing her graduation from Lady Irwin’s college in Delhi. She pursued her further studies at University of California, Berkeley, and was a participant in the US Civil Rights movements.
In her nomination acceptance speech in August 2020, Kamala Harris had invoked several civil rights and political leaders like Mary Church Terrell, Mary McCleod Bethune, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash, Constance Baker Motley and Shirley Chisholm. “We’re not often taught their stories. But as Americans, we all stand on their shoulders. There’s another woman, whose name isn’t known, whose story isn’t shared. Another woman whose shoulders I stand on. And that’s my mother – Shyamala Gopalan Harris,” she had said,
“My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives. She raised us to be proud, strong Black women. And she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.” she said, during the same speech.