Harris addresses nation as first woman vice president-elect
November 09, 2020
After news organizations called the presidential race for former Vice President Joe Biden earlier on Saturday, an exuberant Harris, quoting the late congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis, said, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act,” and told cheering supporters that they had “ushered in a new day for America.” The vice president-elect called her mother, who was 19 years old when she came to the U.S. from India, “the woman most responsible for my presence here today,” saying her mother “believed so deeply” in America. Harris also credited the “generations of women — black women, Asian, white, Latina, Native American women” who made possible her rise to the second-highest office in the land. “Tonight, I reflect on their struggle, their determination and the strength of their vision. … And I stand on their shoulders,” she said, before praising Biden for having “the audacity” to pick her as his running mate. With a Jamaican father who also immigrated to the U.S., Harris became the first woman of black and Indian heritage to serve in the U.S. Senate when she took the oath of office in 2017. She was raised in Oakland, California, and worked in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office after attending the University of California, Hastings, to earn a law degree.1 She later ran successful campaigns to become San Francisco’s district attorney and then the state’s attorney general — the first black woman to win those two offices, according to the Biden-Harris campaign site.2
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