Kamala Harris's Parents Divorced When She Was Quite Young, but Why Did They Split?

After four days of celebration and largely good vibes, Kamala Harris formally accepted the Democratic Party's nomination for president during a speech at the Democratic National Convention. During the speech, Harris spent plenty of time going over her own biography and touched on both of her parents, Shyamala Gopalan and Donald Harris.

Shyamala and Donald met in 1962 and were married just a year later, but the couple had divorced by 1972, when Harris was just eight years old. Following the news that they had divorced, many wondered why Harris's parents had split up.

Harris has never discussed the reasons for her parents' divorce in great detail, but in her speech, she said simply that "the harmony between my parents did not last," explaining that they split up and that it was mostly her mother who raised her and her sister Maya.

Past that, we don't know exactly what caused the split, but what's clear from the way Harris talks about her family is that her mother was far more impactful on the person she ultimately became.

"My mother was a brilliant, 5-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent," Harris said in her speech. "And, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But she never lost her cool. She was tough. Courageous. A trailblazer in the fight for women’s health."

Shyamala and Donald first met while they were both studying at UC Berkeley. Shyamala joined a Black student group and was accepted into it because of India's history of being colonially oppressed.

Donald gave a speech at one of the meetings about his time growing up in Jamaica under British colonial rule, and the two of them began chatting after that. "This was all very interesting to me, and, I daresay, a bit charming. At a subsequent meeting, we talked again, and at the one after that. The rest is now history,” Donald told The New York Times.

From there, the two got married and had children pretty quickly thereafter.

Both Shyamala and Donald went on to have prominent careers in academia. Shyamala worked as a breast cancer researcher, and Donald now works as a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford. In February 2009, though, Shyamala died after battling colon cancer.

“Though I miss her every day, I carry her with me wherever I go,” Harris wrote of her mother in her memoir. “I think of the battles she fought, the values she taught me, her commitment to improve health care for us all."

Harris has clearly taken plenty from what her mother taught her and framed the most important speech of her life around those lessons. Although Shyamala did not live to see the heights that her mother would rise to, it's clear that Harris would not be where she is today had she not received her mother's immense wisdom.