Maya Harris

Some Lesser Known Facts About Maya Harris

• She grew up in a family where her parents were of mixed heritage and followed different religions. While her father is Jamaican American and a Baptist, her mother was an Indian American and followed Hinduism.

  

• Growing up, her father often took her to Jamaica with her sister.

• Her parents separated when she was around 5 years old.

• She was inspired by her parent’s love for activism to pursue a law degree.

• When she was around 11 years old, she organised a protest with her sister in Montreal against a policy that banned children from playing in the lawn.

• In 1984, when she was 17 years old, she gave birth to her daughter, Meena Harris and raised her as a single parent.

• She met her husband, Tony West, through her daughter who was 4 years old at the time.

• She studied together with Tony West at the Stanford Law School. Soon after completing their graduation, they started dating.

• After completing her college education, she worked as a law clerk for United States District Court Judge James Ware in the Northern District of California.

• In 1994, Harris started working at the San Francisco law firm of Jackson Tufts Cole & Black, LLP and worked in civil and criminal litigation until 1999, when the firm was dissolved.

• She has served as an adjunct law professor at the University of San Francisco’s School of Law.

• She started working as a dean at the Lincoln Law School of San Jose in California when she was 29 and became one of the youngest law school deans in the United States.

• In 2003, she assisted her sister, Kamala Harris, in her campaign for becoming the district attorney of San Francisco.

• On 23 October 2006, she became the first African American to lead the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and the first South Asian to work as an executive director of the ACLU.

• She then organised conferences for police-community relations and advocated for police reforms while working at Policy Link, a research institution which focuses on improving economic and social equity.

• In 2006, she worked as a lead attorney in the League of Women Voters of California v. McPherson case and helped restore the right to vote for more than 1 lakh Californians on probation.

• She started working at the Ford Foundation as the vice president for democracy, rights and justice in 2008.

• In the same year, she published a report, titled, ‘Making Every Vote Count: Reforming Felony Disenfranchisement Policies and Practices in California.’

• In 2014, she started working as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School in Massachusetts.

• She discussed the prominence of women of colour in influencing the political outcome in a report titled, ‘Women of Color: A Growing Force in the American Electorate’ in 2014.

• She officiated the marriage of her sister, Kamala Harris with Douglas Emhoff in 2014.

• In 2016, she was a senior policy advisor for Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign’s policy agenda.

  

• She has worked as a political analyst for the American TV channel, MSNBC, from 2017 to 2018.

• In 2020, she served as chair of the presidential campaign of her sister, Kamala Harris.

• In the same year, she revealed in a magazine that she was diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease where the body’s immune system targets the healthy tissues of the body, when she was 22 years old.

• In August 2024, she spoke in support of the presidential campaign of her sister, Kamala Harris, at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).