 | | Senator Kamala Harris accepting the Democratic nomination for vice president in August.Erin Schaff/The New York Times |
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“The thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone — we are all in that room together.” |
— Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president |
After several tense days of vote-counting in a handful of battlegrounds, Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday. The result provided a history-making moment for Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, who will become the first woman to serve as vice president. |
From the earliest days of her childhood, Kamala Harris was taught that the road to racial justice was long. |
She spoke often on the campaign trail of those who had come before her, of her parents, immigrants drawn to the civil rights struggle in the United States — and of the ancestors who had paved the way. |
As she took the stage in Texas shortly before the election, Ms. Harris spoke of being singular in her role but not solitary. |
“Yes, sister, sometimes we may be the only one that looks like us walking in that room,” she told a largely Black audience in Fort Worth. “But the thing we all know is we never walk in those rooms alone — we are all in that room together.” |
With her ascension to the vice presidency, Ms. Harris will become the first woman and first woman of color to hold that office, a milestone for a nation in upheaval, grappling with a damaging history of racial injustice exposed, yet again, in a divisive election. Ms. Harris, 56, embodies the future of a country that is growing more racially diverse, even if the person voters picked for the top of the ticket is a 77-year-old white man. |
That she has risen higher in the country’s leadership than any woman ever has underscores the extraordinary arc of her political career. A former San Francisco district attorney, she was elected as the first Black woman to serve as California’s attorney general. When she was elected a United States senator in 2016, she became only the second Black woman in the chamber’s history. |
Almost immediately, she made a name for herself in Washington with her withering prosecutorial style in Senate hearings, grilling her adversaries in high-stakes moments that at times went viral. |
Yet what also distinguished her was her personal biography: The daughter of a Jamaican father and Indian mother, she was steeped in racial justice issues from her early years in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., and wrote in her memoir of memories of the chants, shouts and “sea of legs moving about” at protests. She recalled hearing Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to mount a national campaign for president, speak in 1971 at a Black cultural center in Berkeley that she frequented as a young girl. “Talk about strength!” she wrote. |
It was a story she tried to tell on the campaign trail during the Democratic primary with mixed success. Kicking off her candidacy with homages to Ms. Chisholm, Ms. Harris attracted a crowd in Oakland that her advisers estimated at more than 20,000, a tremendous show of strength that immediately established her as a front-runner in the race. But vying for the nomination against the most diverse field of candidates in history, she failed to capture a surge of support and dropped out weeks before any votes were cast. |
While she struggled to attract the very women and Black voters she had hoped would connect with her personal story during her primary bid, she continued to make a concerted effort as Mr. Biden’s running mate to reach out to people of color, some of whom have said they feel represented in national politics for the first time. |
After waiting days for results, Democrats rejoiced in a victory that offered a bright spot in an election that delivered losses to many of their candidates, including several high-profile women. |
Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, who got involved in politics through Ms. Chisholm’s presidential campaign, said she always believed she would see the first Black woman at the steps of the White House. |
“Here you have now this remarkable, brilliant, prepared African-American woman, South Asian woman, ready to fulfill the dreams and aspirations of Shirley Chisholm and myself and so many women of color,” she said. “This is exciting and is finally a breakthrough that so many of us have been waiting for. And it didn’t come easy.” |
Read the full story here. |
Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | A Biden-Harris campaign event in Florida last month.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times |
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- “It’s time for America to unite. And to heal. We are the United States of America.” Joe R. Biden was elected the 46th president of the United States on Saturday, becoming the first candidate to beat an incumbent in more than a quarter-century. [Read the story]
- “We can use that as a vehicle to really talk about what I see as the most important work in my life, which is all the stuff we’re doing off the field.” Megan Rapinoe, the decorated American soccer player, has a book coming out on Tuesday. It’s only kind of about sports. [Read the story]
- “I really enjoy watching women in action.” Manohla Dargis, a Times film critic, writes that watching actresses become action stars made her think differently about bodies and the meaning of representation. [Read the story]
- “Early females in the Americas were big game hunters.” The discovery of a 9,000-year-old female skeleton buried with what archaeologists call a “big-game hunting kit” in the Andes highlands of Peru has challenged ancient gender roles. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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