Kamala Harris Is From Berkeley—but She Doesn’t Talk About It Much

When the Democratic National Convention introduced Vice President Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee on Thursday, one key bit of her background was slightly unclear—her hometown.

A video at the DNC displayed her hometown as the “East Bay”—the local term for all of the large cities across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Harris has previously emphasized her connection to Oakland, where she launched her first campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019. At her kickoff rally, the then-California senator said she was “proud to be a daughter of Oakland, California.”

But Harris actually spent most of her childhood in Berkeley—the East Bay city most famous for the flagship University of California campus and its history of radical politics and student protests dating back to the 1960s.

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“Berkeley is viewed as the most liberal city in the United States, and we’re proud of that,” Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín told The New York Times. “But maybe for some people in the red states, that may freak them out.”

The Times ran a story over the weekend highlighting how Harris has “virtually erased” her Berkeley roots, but in a surprise twist, “the residents... say they get it.”

“Oh, people would definitely think Berserkeley!” one resident who lives near Harris’ childhood home, told The Times last week. “We have such a reputation for being on the far left, that we’re all a bunch of communists and socialists.”

The Times notes Berkeley was mostly ignored at the DNC convention, and claims Harris began detaching herself from the city “years ago” as she prepared for a political life in California.

A spokeswoman for the Harris campaign had no comment when pressed by The Times over the subject. The campaign did not immediately respond to comment when approached by the Daily Beast.

Harris was born in a hospital in Oakland, California, to parents who met at the University of California, Berkeley. She lived in multiple apartments in Berkeley from the age of 5 until age 12, when she moved with her mother and sister to Montreal. She ended up in Berkeley in her mid-twenties, according to the Times.

At the DNC, in a pre-acceptance speech video showing photos and home movies of the vice president’s childhood home, the narrator only described Berkeley as a “tight-knit neighborhood,” which taught Harris “what it means to be middle class.” In the video, grainy footage of a Bay Area freeway displayed exits for Oakland and San Francisco.

But multiple former aides from Harris’ early career told The Times that the vice president had no conversations about emphasizing the larger cities of Oakland or San Francisco over the college town.

Harris’ 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, might hold some insights into her thinking. In the book, Harris also claimed both cities, writing that she “spent the formative years of my childhood living on the boundary between Oakland and Berkeley.”

Some Berkeley residents even tried to get her childhood home recognized as a historical landmark—but homeowners in the neighborhood were concerned the designation might cause disruptions, SFGate reported in 2021.

Thousand Oaks Elementary School, the desegregated Berkeley public school she attended as a child, now features a large mural of the vice president.

“[Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl] Warren’s words—proclaiming segregation ‘inherently unequal,’—had taken fifteen long years to make it to Berkeley, California,” Harris wrote in her memoir. “I was grateful they had come in time for me; my elementary school class was only the second class in the city to be desegregated through busing.”

Harris also emphasized her parents’ roots in the city and the university where they first crossed paths. Her father, Jamaican-American economics professor Donald Harris, first immigrated to the U.S. to attend Berkeley. Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, also immigrated from India to attend California’s premier university. “She was a teenager when she left home for Berkeley in 1958 to pursue a doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology, on her way to becoming a breast cancer researcher,” Harris writes. She said her parents met and fell in love at the college.

After passing the California bar in 1990, Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney in the Alameda County—the East Bay county home to both Oakland and Berkeley. She bought a condo in Oakland in 1993, the San Francisco Standard reported, and lived there until 1998. She sold the apartment when she was hired as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco.

Oakland, for its part, seems happy to claim the Democratic nominee. “Unapologetic warriors for justice, that’s the Oakland brand,” Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf told the Times on Monday.

Oakland is no stranger to radical politics either. In the 1960s and 1970s, the East Bay city became famous as the birthplace of the Black Panther Party—whose famous Free Breakfast for Children meals were first hosted at the city’s St. Augustine Episcopal Church.