In March, President Donald Trump first touted hydryroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19-despite serious pushback from the F.D.A. In April, she announced she has lupus-after battling the condition privately for more than three decades. In an essay she wrote for Tavis Smiley’s best-selling book The Covenant with Black America, Maya said: “Something is clearly wrong when the government’s most effective affirmative action program is the preference people of color receive when entering not college but the criminal justice system.” She also helped edit her law school friend Michelle Alexander’s seminal book about the modern civil rights movement, The New Jim Crow. As a senior associate at the civil rights group PolicyLink, the executive director of the largest ACLU affiliate in the country, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, and the vice president for democracy, rights, and justice at the Ford Foundation, Maya spent decades advocating for criminal justice reform and community policing. At 29, she took the reins of the Lincoln Law School and became one of the nation’s youngest-ever law school deans.įrom there, she followed in her mother’s footsteps, making a name for herself in the civil rights community. Maya Harris is a well-known civil rights lawyer and public policy advocate.Īfter graduating from Stanford Law School in 1992, Maya practiced corporate law, while also teaching law school classes on the side. “When I think about it, all of the joyous moments in our lives, all of the challenging moments, all of the moments of transition, we have always been together.” “We forged a bond that is unbreakable,” Kamala told the Washington Post.

One example: When Maya and Kamala were 8 and 10 years old, respectively, they launched a successful campaign to turn an unused courtyard in their Bay Area apartment building into a playground.Ī couple of years later, when their mom Shyamala accepted a job at McGill University, the threesome moved to Montreal, and the sisters-who were enrolled in a school where everyone else spoke French-became even closer.

“I joke that as a child, I was surrounded by adults marching and shouting for this thing called justice.” So it's no surprise that from the time they were children, the two sisters fought for what they perceived as injustice. “I grew up with a stroller's-eye view of the civil rights movement,” Kamala wrote on an old campaign website. A Berkeley civil rights activist, Shyamala took the sisters to protests and marches from a young age.

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