Her Jamaican father Donald and Indian mother Shyamala had only been in the USA for a few years when Kamala was born on October 20, 1964. Little did they suspect that their daughter's early school days would later figure in the country's presidential election.
It was the home community in northern California that in the late 1960s tried to alleviate segregation by "busing" thousands of children from predominantly black areas to schools with predominantly white students, and vice versa.
"The girl was me"
50 years later, Kamala Harris brought this up when she criticized Joe Biden for working against busing – implicitly, for continued segregation – during the 2020 Democratic primary.
A little girl in California rode the bus to school every day. And that little girl was me.
The statement put the issue on the agenda, even though she and Biden later became running mates in the election and Harris became the USA's first female vice president.
She was already used to breaking glass ceilings. After studying law, Harris became in 2003 the first black woman to be elected district attorney in San Francisco, in 2011 the first woman to become the state's top law enforcement officer, and later the first Indian-American senator in Congress.
Not in tune with the times
She came to the Senate and Washington after the 2016 election, at the same time as Donald Trump moved into the White House. This gave Kamala Harris a platform to become nationally known, as one of the Republicans' toughest critics.
But her prosecutor background did not fit in with the 2020 presidential campaign, when the justice system was strongly questioned in connection with the "Black lives matter" movement after the police murder of the black man George Floyd.
This year, the zeitgeist is different. The USA is characterized by concern about crime, and Trump is the first former president to be convicted of a crime.
As a prosecutor, I took on perpetrators of all kinds, Harris has said.
Trust me: I know Donald Trump's type.
Charming humor
If such outbursts may seem cold, she has tried to balance them out in the election campaign by emphasizing that Democrats stand for future optimism and joy. This has become particularly clear after she chose the "nice guy" Tim Walz as her vice presidential candidate.
Kamala Harris' laughter is so famous that Trump has tried to use it against her.
Have you seen her laugh? She's crazy. You can read a lot into a laugh. She's crazy, completely crazy, he has said.
Now 60-year-old Kamala Harris has been Joe Biden's vice president since January 2021. The two have a close working relationship, and Biden supports Harris as the Democrats' next presidential candidate.
Harris' father is from Jamaica and her mother from India, she herself was born in California. After living for a time in Canada and studying at Howard University in Washington DC, she returned to her home state to become a lawyer and prosecutor. In 2004, she became district attorney in San Francisco.
In 2011, she was appointed California's top law enforcement officer (attorney general), a post she held until she was elected to the US Senate in 2016. Then she became the second black woman in the chamber.
Harris ran her own presidential campaign in 2019, before she threw in the towel and backed Joe Biden.
She married lawyer Doug Emhoff at the age of 50, whom she met on a "blind date" arranged by friends. She has no children of her own, but two stepchildren who call her "Momala".
