Kamala Harris
individualLast updated: November 22, 2020
Kamala Devi Harris was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father in Oakland, California on October 20, 1964. She is, in part, a descendant of a Jamaican slave owner, as Harris’s father, Donald J. Harris, explained in a January 2019 essay which he wrote about his family’s heritage:
“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, land-owner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).â€
https://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individuals/kamala-harris
