The Woman Who Led Kamala Harris to This Moment

Sharon McGaffie was used to a full house. One evening in early 1969, her cousin Aubrey LaBrie did what he would often do—he brought over a handful of his friends to her West Berkeley duplex. Her home would turn into an impromptu hub for young, Black intellectuals, a place for them to have friendly squabbles over the latest news, which at the time was dominated by the civil-rights struggle and the newly elected president, Richard Nixon. McGaffie, then just a teenager, would do her homework while her mother and another cousin whipped up a pot of Louisiana gumbo, a family favorite.

But that night, there was someone new whom McGaffie had never seen before: a tiny, sari-clad woman named Shyamala Gopalan. “She stood out a little bit because she was Indian,” McGaffie said. But Gopalan didn’t seem to feel out of place. She joined in on the debates and, at one point, went to the kitchen and struck up a conversation with McGaffie’s mother. “She fit right in,” LaBrie told me.

Gopalan spent much of her life fitting in where she wasn’t supposed to. When she left India in 1958 to pursue a graduate degree at UC Berkeley, she was one of the few Indian women enrolled at the university. In fact, the 19-year-old was one of the few Indian women in the Five years later, she bucked the Indian tradition of an arranged marriage and fell for a budding economist named Donald Harris. They named their first daughter after the Sanskrit word for “lotus”: Kamala.