How Kamala Harris's immigrant parents found a home in a black study group

Donald Harris and Shyamala Gopalan grew up under British colonial rule on different sides of the planet

At an off-campus space at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1962, a tall, thin Jamaican Ph.D. student addressed a small crowd, drawing parallels between his native country and the United States.

He told the group, a roomful of Black students, that he had grown up observing British colonial power in Jamaica, the way a small number of whites had cultivated a “native Black elite” in order to mask extreme social inequality.

At 24, Donald J. Harris was already professorial, as reserved as the Anglican acolyte he had once been. But his ideas were edgy. One member of