Here's what to know about Kamala Harris' ties to Madison (2024)

Vice President Kamala Harris is on track to become the Democratic nominee for president following President Joe Biden’s announcement to drop out of the 2024 race Sunday, his subsequent endorsem*nt of her and apparent widespread support for her candidacy.

Harris intends to campaign in Milwaukee on Tuesday to try to win over Democratic voters there — plans that were made before Biden stepped down.

But Harris also has ties to Madison, another blue city that could be critical to her bid for president in this battleground state.

What are Kamala Harris’ roots in Madison?

“When I was five, my family moved to Madison, where my father got a job teaching economics at the University of Wisconsin and my mother worked as a breast cancer researcher,” Harris wrote in a 2020 Wisconsin State Journal op-ed. “It was a brief moment — but for a little while, we called Wisconsin home.”

Harris’ mom was Shyamala Gopalan Harris and her father was Donald Harris. Harris also has a younger sister, Maya.

She lived on Madison’s West Side before leaving in 1970. In March, the vice president visited her childhood home when campaigning in Madison and said in an interview with The Capital Times that her family moved to Madison in 1968.

The home, before being renovated, was a two-bedroom house on a bluff above Lake Mendota in the Spring Harbor neighborhood.

Where was Harris born?

Kamala was born in Oakland, California, on Oct. 20, 1964. She lived in Illinois, too, before moving to Madison.

Who were Harris’ parents?

According to UW-Madison, Shyamala Harris was the child of a women’s rights advocate and a prominent civil servant from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. After graduating from India’s University of Delhi when Shyamala was 19, she came to the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue doctoral studies in nutrition and endocrinology.

Donald Harris was born in Jamaica and came to Berkeley to get his doctorate in economics from Jamaica’s University College of the West Indies, according to UW-Madison.

The two met after joining a group of students who met on Sundays to talk about Black writers who were overlooked by the school’s curriculum and to debate about politics, decolonization and activism, according to UW-Madison.

In her autobiography, “The Truths We Hold,” Kamala Harris wrote that her parents fell in love in “the most American way — while marching together for justice in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Her parents moved to Madison in the late 1960s after accepting their respective jobs at UW-Madison, according to the university.

Her mother was a professor at Madison’s McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, studying hormonal interactions relative to breast cancer both in 1968 and 1969.

In 1969, the vice president’s father was one of 14 Black UW-Madison faculty and staff who publicly supported Black students who had presented 13 demands to the UW-Madison administration to combat racial inequities at the time. He was also part of an advisory committee for UW-Madison’s then Afro-American Center (now the Black Cultural Center) in 1970. In May 1970, he was one of 242 faculty members to stop teaching classes because of U.S. entry into Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

The two later divorced, according to UW-Madison, with Shyamala returning to Berkeley with Kamala and Maya, and Donald leaving UW-Madison in 1972 for Stanford University in California.

“Wisconsin has a special place in my heart,” Kamala wrote in her 2020 State Journal piece.