How Kamala Harris’ Early Career Began in the 1990s

Kamala Harris is widely known as the 49th and current vice president of the United States, serving since 2021 under President Joe Biden. She is also the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in the 2024 election and is the first woman, African American, and Asian American to hold the vice presidency. In this slideshow, we travel back in time to look at Harris’ early career and moments leading up to present day.

In 1990, Kamala Harris was hired as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California.

In 1994, she was appointed to the state Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission by Speaker of the California Assembly Willie Brown.

Kamala Harris initially attended Vanier College in Montreal from 1981 to 1982. She then enrolled at Howard University, a historically black university in Washington, D.C.

While at Howard, she became a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Harris graduated in 1986 with a degree in political science and economics.

She attended the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco afterward. At Hastings, she served as president of the Black Law Students Association. Harris graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989.

In February 1998, she was recruited as an assistant district attorney by San Francisco district attorney Terence Hallinan.

Harris became the chief of the Career Criminal Division, supervising five attorneys and prosecuting serious criminal cases.

She particularly focused on three-strikes cases involving homicide, burglary, robbery, and sexual assault.

In August 2000, Harris took a job at San Francisco City Hall, working for city attorney Louise Renne.

She ran the Family and Children’s Services Division, representing child abuse and neglect cases, and received Renne’s endorsement during her district attorney campaign.

In the 1990s, Kamala Harris dated Willie Brown, who was the Speaker of the California Assembly and later the Mayor of San Francisco, and she briefly dated talk show host Montel Williams in 2001.

Harris met her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, in 2013 through a mutual friend, and they married on August 22, 2014.

Harris is a Baptist and a member of the Third Baptist Church of San Francisco and The Links, an invitation-only organization of prominent Black American women.

Harris’s family includes her sister Maya, a lawyer and MSNBC political analyst, and her brother-in-law Tony West, who is general counsel of Uber, along with her niece Meena, the founder of the Phenomenal Women Action Campaign.