WASHINGTON, DC — Kamala Harris will soon become a household name as she runs for the presidency in 2020. This fast-rising politician and lawyer from Oakland was appointed the junior United States Senator from California in 2017. Prior to this position, she was the Attorney General of California, an office she held from 2011 to 2017.
Kamala is known for her refusal to back down or be silenced by her male contemporaries. An ever resilient truth-seeker, this Howard University graduate is a go-getter. The present presidential rumors about the Senator have shone the light on her husband to find out what kind of person the possible debut First Man of U.S is.
Who is Kamala Harris’s Husband?
His name is Douglas Emhoff, he has been the managing Westcoast director at Venable LLP since 2006, according to his LinkedIn page. However, in early 2017, he took the bar in Washington D.C and was sworn in on March 10 of the same year. This move has definitely done nothing to quiet the presidency rumors.
Like his wife, Douglas Emhoff is the kind of man that lets nothing stand in his way; a hot head of sorts. He recounted in an interview with Law360 an event that happened during his early days as a lawyer. He had outrightly accused another lawyer of lying during court proceedings. Though he still stands by his statement, he does concede that he could have handled it better. He says now he will instead file the information away and be prepared to use it at an appropriate time and in the right manner. Learning from one’s mistakes is definitely a good trait for any potential first man of the U.S.
In 2015, a report from the L.A. Times revealed that the couple had a combined asset of between $1.5 million to $4 million. Their tax returns were revealed by Sacramento Bee in 2016. It showed that they had paid approximately $450,000 in State and Federal Income taxes.
Emhoff and Harris are big believers in philanthropy. The report also revealed that they had donated $32,947 to charity, with $10,000 of that going to UNICEF.
Emhoff always tries to keep his followers on social media up to date with happenings in his family. He posts regularly about himself, his wife and his kids.
Harris’s mother is Tamil Indian; she emigrated from Chennai in India in 1960. Her name is Shyamala Gopalan Harris and she was born in 1938. She was also a well-known researcher for breast cancer. She died in 2009.
Her father is Donald Harris and is of Jamaican descent. He came to the U.S from Jamaica a year after her mother in 1961 to do his graduate studies in economics at the University of California. He would later become an economics professor at Stanford University.
The family resided in Berkeley, California. When Kamala was seven years old, her parents separated and her mother was given custody of herself and her younger sister, Maya. Following the divorce, her mom relocated them to Montreal, Quebec, which is where she took up employment at the Jewish Teaching Hospital and McGill University. Much later, Harris went back to California, where she earned her Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Sen. Kamala Harris says it was her mother’s “act of self-determination,” made when she decided to marry a man of her own choosing, that made her and her sister Maya Americans. In a Facebook post, written on the last day of June — Immigrant Heritage Month — Harris wrote about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris.
“I wanted to share one last story today for Immigrant Heritage Month — my own. My mother, Shyamala Harris arrived at the University of California-Berkeley from India in 1959,” Harris wrote. “She had dreams of becoming a scientist. The plan was to go back home when she finished school, but when she met my father Donald Harris [a Jamaican-American Stanford University economics professor], she made a different plan. She went against a practice reaching back thousands of years, and instead of an arranged marriage, chose a love marriage. This act of self-determination made me and my sister Maya. And — like millions of the children of immigrants before and since — it made us Americans.”
Shyamala Gopalan Harris died Feb. 11, 2009, from cancer at the age of 70, according to an obituary in the San Francisco Gate. It describes her as “a world-renowned scientist, a mentor, an activist, a mother. At 5-ft. stature, hers was a commanding presence characterized by a sharp wit, keen sense of humor and endless depth of knowledge. She embodied an independent, confident and curious spirit that led her to travel alone in the U.S. as a teen; forge a career as a brilliant breast cancer researcher; join the Civil Rights Movement; introduce a generation of students of color to careers in science; and, through it all, raise two remarkable young women, by herself.”
The couple divorced when Harris was 5.
Born in south India to Rajam, her mother, and P.V. Gopalan, her father, a diplomat in the Indian government, Shyamala Gopalan graduated from Delhi University and enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology. She spent her early career conducting research at Berkeley’s Department of Zoology and Cancer Research Lab. She taught at numerous universities and also worked at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at the Jewish General Hospital and the Department of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She was published in numerous journals and received numerous honors, and was a frequent peer reviewer for the National Institutes of Health. She also served on the President’s Special Commission on Breast Cancer, according to her biography.
Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, grew up in a household that combined Hindu and Baptist teachings. She was raised in Berkeley, Oakland, and Montreal, where the girls’ mother took a position doing research at the Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.
Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and received her JD from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989. She was admitted to the California bar in 1990. She is married to attorney Douglas Emhoff, partner in charge of the law firm Venable LLP’s Los Angeles office.
Her sister Maya Lakshmi Harris West is a lawyer, public policy advocate, author and television commentator.
Harris: immigrant mother, a scientist, made her and sister into Americans.
