'Do something:' Kamala Harris' rapid rise driven by call to action

Hours before Kamala Harris took st for first time as Joe Biden’s vice presidential pick, she received a text mess from a childhood classmate with photos from ir school days.

A pensive Harris sits on floor, dutifully looking ahead toward a teacher out of frame. 6-year-old is in center of an experiment in racial integration. She was among students who took bus from ir neighborhoods to school in more affluent hillsides of Berkeley, California.

“That’s how it started. re’s question!” Harris, 55, texted back to Aaron Peskin, former classmate and w a San Francisco supervisor.

Fifty-one years later, she’s first Black woman and first Asian American woman named to a major party presidential ticket, joining Biden in his fight to defeat Republican President Donald Trump.

Harris’s path toward second-highest office in United States has tracked nation’s ongoing struggle for racial equality. start-and-stop progress and sometimes messy debate has shaped her life: an upbringing by immigrant parents, a childhood among civil rights activists, a career at helm of a flawed criminal justice system and her rapid ascent in Democratic politics.

Those experiences forged a politician who is unafraid to buck political powers that be, but also charts a cautious course through policy debates. She’s emerged as a leader who kws power of tough questioning and a viral moment, and also weight of her role as a voice for women of color.

“My mor Shyamala raised my sister Maya and me to believe that it was up to us and every generation of Americans to keep on marching,” Harris said Wednesday. “She’d tell us: Don’t sit around and complain about things. Do something.”

Her fast rise hasn’t been without criticism, including on her shifting policy positions. She endured questions familiar to women in politics, particularly women of color, about her ambition. Trump labeled her “nasty” for her piercing interrogation of his minees. Some progressive Democrats, meanwhile, view her work as a prosecutor skeptically.

Her own presidential bid, anunced before 20,000 people in her hometown of Oakland, ended before voting began as she struggled to raise money or find a clear mess.

She was a Howard University graduate with high-powered ties when she returned to her native Bay Area for law school and took a job at Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1990.

In 2003, she decided to run for San Francisco district attorney, challenging her former boss, Terence Hallinan. He was progressive, and Harris tacked right on issues to run against him, pledging to be tough on crime and repair relationships with police. She also took on cause of Black mors who lost ir children to homicide and felt Hallinan was neglecting cases.

Harris, n 39, handily won race.

Just months into her tenure, Harris decided t to seek death penalty against a man charged with killing a police officer. move angered law enforcement officers and drew rebuke from U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, city’s former mayor and a force in California politics.

But years later, when she ran for attorney general and needed statewide support, Harris tempered her stance on capital punishment, pledging to uphold it if elected and staying silent on ballot measures to repeal it. She appealed a 2014 decision by a federal judge calling it cruel and unusual punishment and won, keeping capital punishment on books. Today, she wants a federal moratorium.

Observers and critics point to se episodes as evidence of Harris’s penchant for staking out cautious positions that uphold status quo. Her allies say she worked within confines of system and politics of time. As district attorney, she launched a reentry program that connected nviolent offenders to jobs and education that became a national model.

“I remember first time I visited county jail. So many young men, and y were mostly Black or brown or poor,” she writes in her 2019 book, “ Truths We Hold,” recalling her time as a young prosecutor. “y represented a living monument to lost potential, and I wanted to tear it down.”

At same time, she took on truancy and supported a statewide law modeled off her city initiative that threatened parents with jail time, fines and lost public benefits if ir kids missed school.

Harris barely won her race for state attorney general in 2010. Soon Black Lives Matter movement was taking hold, along with outr over police brutality, particularly against Black youth.

Harris declined to support state legislation that would have required her office to investigation fatal police shootings. w Harris backs such investigations.

As attorney general she met n-Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Beau, her counterpart in Delaware. two worked toger on a settlement with nation’s five largest mortg lenders following foreclosure crisis. Joe Biden said this past week that relationship was key in his decision to tap Harris as his running mate. Beau Biden died of a brain tumor in 2015.

In 2016, Trump won presidency and Harris her U.S. Senate seat. By next year, Trump’s brief tenure had convinced Harris that her perspective, particularly as a Black woman, should be represented in Democratic primary field, said Nathan Barankin, Harris’s former chief of staff.

That perspective was steeped in Harris’s upbringing by two immigrant parents who came to U.S. to pursue education. Her far, Donald Harris, came from Jamaica and her mor, Shyamala Gopalan, from India.

couple had two daughters, Kamala Devi and Maya Lakshmi. y told m stories of being met by police with fire hoses as y marched for civil rights and against Vietnam War and of meeting Martin Lur King Jr., Harris wrote in her book. But y split soon after Harris started school. Gopalan became main force in ir lives.

She immersed m in Black community she and her ex-husband had embraced, though y celebrated ir South Asian herit through ir names and ir close ties and occasional visits with ir mor’s family in India.

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Dale reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press writer Brian Slodysko in Washington contributed to this report.